‘I don’t understand the way it is I can remember some things,’ he tells me with a sense of wonder as we sit in his lovely Gold Coast village unit on a warm December day. We leave the front door open and allow the warm sweet air and the screeches of the rainbow lorikeets to accompany us as we talk. ‘You see, I can still recall the naps we took at school when I was three or four. At midday they turned the desks upside down and strung hammocks between the legs for our one-hour kip. I can still visualise it,’ he says, shaking his head slightly.
‘When the war started, everyone had different emotions,’ he says. ‘Some thought with dread, Oh God, this is it, others were looking forward to it like an adventure. I was somewhere in the middle: Well, you’re going to earn your pay now, mate. That was the phrase we all used.’
Born in Cornwall, raised in London, Stan decided to pursue his life-long dream of flying by joining the RAF on 1 February 1938, happily leaving his dreary job as a clerk in a tobacco factory. Arriving home one day, he simply announced to his parents, ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m joining the air force,’ and signed on for four years.
Unusually, Stan had no desire to be a pilot, fearing he lacked the requisite education. ‘I left school at fourteen. I wouldn’t have made it with my education,’ he says. ‘Not in those days.’ So, despite his total experience of radios being confined to having put together a crystal set as a kid using his wire bedspring as an aerial, it was to No. 1 Radio School at Cranwell that Stan was sent, graduating into the permanent RAF as a wireless operator in December 1938.
He loved every minute of it. Posted to the School of Air Navigation at Manston in Kent, Stan was flying every day, taking navigators under training. ‘Sometimes they’d lose themselves on an exercise, and turn round and look at me pleadingly. “Oi, can you give us a bearing?”’ But, as the stream of casualties in the air war swelled to a river, it was inevitable that Stan would be required to perform less benign duties and, in the middle of 1941, found himself in Norfolk at a small grass aerodrome called Bodney, home to No. 82 Squadron, 2 Group, Bomber Command, flying the twin-engine Bristol Blenheim medium bomber. It was already a squadron with a history.
‘Before I joined them, it had been wiped out – twice,’ he says. ‘Not that they told us that at the time.’ No. 82 Squadron had indeed endured a ghastly war thus far, having taken part in two attacks that have gone down as black marks in the often chequered annals of Bomber Command. First, on 17 May 1940, during the German breakthrough into France, 82’s twelve Blenheims attacked the German troops pouring through the gap they’d punched in Allied lines near Gembloux. Flak broke up the Blenheims’ formation even before their escort of Hurricane fighters arrived to protect them. Fifteen Messerschmitt Me 109s then picked them off at leisure. All but one Blenheim was shot down, the sole survivor, badly damaged, limping home and crash-landing in England (the crew, amazingly, escaping without a scratch). Then, less than two months later, in mid-August it happened again. The target this time was a German airfield at Aalborg in recently occupied Denmark. Twelve Blenheims were once again sent in over the North Sea, appearing above the aerodrome early on an overcast morning. Tragically for them, a detachment of 109s had landed from Norway, allowing just enough time for the pilots to refuel before taking their already warmed-up aircraft aloft to meet the Blenheims head on. Once again, all but one of the twelve were shot down, with twenty-five out of the thirty-six British airmen killed.
After each of these catastrophic engagements, 82 Squadron was reconstituted with fresh young airmen and was operational again within forty-eight hours. Such is the production line of war.
This was the legacy Stan and his crew were inheriting as, fresh-faced, they began their tour. The morning after their arrival at Bodney, the chief engineer took them out and showed them over their brand-new Blenheim. ‘This is your aeroplane – V6445,’ he said. ‘Look after it.’ In mid-1941, that was not going to be easy.
There were more Bristol Blenheims than any other type of British aircraft flying when the Second World War began, and in 1936, when this sleek, all-metal monoplane with its ultra-modern features such as retractable undercarriage, metal flaps and super-charged engines had first taken to the skies, it indeed seemed a vision of military aviation’s future. Unfortunately however, at about the same time, the Germans were also developing an aeroplane, the Messerschmitt 109 fighter which, three years later, would render the Blenheim and just about everything else in Britain’s bomber arsenal completely obsolete. Blenheim losses in the first years of the war were staggering, with a few rounds of cannon into their unprotected bellies from the German pilots easily enough to send them spiralling into the ground. Their best defence thus became flying at low level, but this in turn made them easy meat for the anti-aircraft gunners on the ground. But without better aircraft to replace them, the Blenheims flew on. The bravery of the young airmen like Stan, his pilot, nineteen-year-old Dennis Gibb, and navigator / bomb aimer Laurie Cash from Armagh in Northern Ireland is beyond measure.
Anti-shipping patrols were to make up the bulk of Stan’s brief tour, and he was blooded on his very first trip. On 19 July 1941, an evening in high summer, Stan’s Blenheim was one of six sent to attack a convoy of German merchant ships passing through the English Channel. I ask him if he remembers what he felt before that first operation.
‘Well,’ he answers deliberately after a thoughtful pause, ‘you know what to expect, but you don’t know what it’s going to be like. Coming back from it, I remember thinking, My God. If that’s what I’ve got to put up with for the next few months, it’s going to be hellish’.
And it was. Although describing it as ‘short and sweet’, Stan’s first mission was nearly also his last. Flying at a height he illustrates by holding his hands a few inches apart (‘This height,’ he says with a wry laugh), the Blenheims tore out from Bodney across the water towards a group of German vessels accompanied by their escorting flak ships. He recalls the atmosphere on board as if it were yesterday.
‘Very little is spoken over the intercom. The pilot orientates the plane towards what it is he’s going to attack and speaks only occasionally with the navigator. I’m also the rear gunner, so I’m in the turret looking out for fighters. The flak ships open up on us. Beside us another Blenheim is hit in the engine. It catches fire immediately and – bang – straight down into the Channel. No survivors.’ Ignoring the flak as much as one could, the skipper approached a merchant vessel and pulled up just in time before releasing his two 500-pound armour-piercing bombs. ‘It was no good dropping them on the deck,’ says Stan. ‘They’d just bounce off. You had to punch them through the side of the hull.’ A ten-second delayed-action fuse allowed them time to get clear. Stan then witnessed a terrific explosion and the ship was suddenly at the base of a massive plume of black smoke. ‘I simply said down the intercom, “Good-o. Direct hit, Dennis.” I didn’t see it sink but it was obviously mortally wounded.’ Not bad for their first trip. Back at the base, the same flight sergeant who had warned them to take care of the aircraft seemed unperturbed by its condition. ‘He took a look at the shrapnel holes from the flak and actually seemed quite pleased. “Well, you lot obviously had a good time!”’
Stan, I’m realising as we speak, is a remarkable find. Possessing not just a memory and an alacrity that utterly belies his years, but also a strong sensitivity, a person who instinctively seems to understand my interest and is at pains to convey the colour, the feeling, the very atmosphere of flying into action in a Bristol Blenheim in the early years of the Second World War.
‘We get aboard, check the intercom,’ he says, taking me, unprompted, through his crew’s pre-flight procedure before a shipping strike. ‘I test my guns by firing a burst into the ground, then we take off and rendezvous with the other aeroplanes, then go in over the sea at nought feet.’
As the memories come flooding back, Stan pauses, then concentrates, choosing his words slowly. ‘Things can happen quickly, and in any sort of sequence. One mome
nt you could be peppered with flak, one moment you’re seeing an aircraft go in. I saw several – shot down, hitting power lines etc., and it’s awful to see but – and it’s a funny thing, Michael – it’s only a passing moment. You register it and then get back to the job you’re doing. When you get back it’s sad and you realise there’s an empty space in the squadron, but you almost accept the fact that someone isn’t going to come back. And you feel it about yourself, too. You realise when you take off. The chances of us returning are quite slim.’
How does such fear not prevent you from carrying out the job? I ask him, unable to comprehend myself functioning in such a situation.
‘It’s a strange thing,’ he says, again with that shake of the head. ‘There was tension in the briefing room when you found out what you had to do, but once you were in the aeroplane, you were fine. You could do anything. That’s how we felt. Even when flak was coming up at you, somehow it didn’t mean anything, as if you were watching it all happen in the third person. Someone was firing at you, and you just accepted it as part of the job.’
There was a pattern of emotion, he says, replicated with every mission: the initial terror as the job and target were revealed in the briefing, settled by the confidence of the pre-flight procedure in the aircraft; then the steely determination of carrying out the attack; and finally the sense of relief when the wheels came down on a safe return to base. ‘It was the same every time,’ he says. ‘But when you got back it was all over: out to the pub that same night and you forgot about it,’ though, I suggest, perhaps allowing yourself a quick glance around to note the absentees. He concurs. ‘It was all very strange. You have a different slant on life when you’re fighting a war.’
At this, he pauses, passing me a photograph: a superb image of two young airmen – one obviously himself – their faces awash with exhaustion, a Blenheim parked just behind them. ‘I remember it being taken,’ he says. ‘A newspaper photographer was on the base and he took it just after we’d gotten back from Cologne.’ The raid Stan recalls is a famous one, flown in August 1941, ordered, some say, personally by Churchill as a morale booster during what was for England one of the grimmest phases of the war. The targets were two power stations near Cologne, Knapsack and Quadrath, and Stan, along with fifty-five Blenheims from 2 Group, would fly deep into Germany, in broad daylight, alone. It was as much a demonstration that the RAF was in fact capable of hitting the Germans, as it was any attempt to inflict serious damage. To Stan and the crews, it all sounded suicidal. ‘I can still remember the reaction from the airmen in the briefing room when we saw the red line of tape marking the target. You could audibly hear the groan, We’re not coming back from this one!’ And many were correct. Flying at low level their escort of Spitfire and Whirlwind fighters could accompany them only as far as the Dutch coast. For the remaining 150 miles to the very well defended target and back, they were on their own. ‘I can still see one of those Whirlwind pilots waving as he sped away,’ Stan remembers. Streaking across Germany at heights as low as fifty feet, Stan recalls looking around him and feeling safe amid the numbers of this relatively large formation, until a Blenheim beside him failed to clear power lines and exploded fierily on the ground. The whole crew saw it, but nothing was said. Approaching the target, the large chimney stacks of the power stations could clearly be seen from some distance away, and the Blenheim climbed to 400 feet. They let go their two 500-pound bombs and sped away, sustaining some damage from flak but avoiding fighters to make it home. ‘It all happens so quick,’ Stan tells me. ‘You approach the target, drop your bombs and speed away. It’s over in seconds, really. It’s only afterwards you really start to think about it.’
Back at Bodney, Stan’s ground crew were delighted to see them, despite some battle damage and even a ‘very well cooked’ seagull which was discovered inside the engine nacelle! ‘Yeah, we were a bit low today,’ replied Stan with nonchalance to their incredulous crew chief. ‘In actual fact,’ he says to me, ‘I think I do remember startling a rather large flock of birds as we crossed the Dutch coast.’ The Daily Mail photographer snapped the remarkable shot of Stan and his pilot, Dennis, moments after they climbed out of the aircraft, relief palpable in their faces. Twelve Blenheims from five squadrons failed to return, with several more having crashed in training for the raid, representing a loss of 22 per cent of the total force. Five escorting Spitfires also failed to return. The damage to the power stations was minimal, and soon repaired.
It took very little time for the crews, should they survive, to become blooded ‘old hands’, and one afternoon returning from a ‘beat-up’ of what German shipping they could find along the Dutch coast, Stan was grateful for the level-headedness of his now experienced crew. Flying home over the Channel, a sole Me 109 emerged from an airfield somewhere along the enemy coast and latched onto Stan’s tail. ‘It hung off just behind us. It seemed to be toying with us a little, jumping from one side of us to another.’ Following the German fighter’s every move with his twin .303s, Stan in the turret waited for the fighter to attack. ‘It just moved from side to side and didn’t fire. I said to the pilot, “I think he’s on his first flight, he looks scared.” I still think that too.’ If the possibly inexperienced German had decided to open up with the twenty-millimetre cannon in his aircraft’s nose, Stan is certain they would have been shot down. ‘I let off a couple of shots at him as he moved back and forth, but he didn’t fire at us. We were flying only just above the waves, and I think he was reluctant to attack us that low. We were just lucky.’ After a few extremely tense minutes, the German pilot decided to leave them alone.
As I turn the page of his logbook to 20 August, a few brief lines barely hint at the story of the most dramatic day of Stan’s tour: ‘Attacked vessel off Norderney. Two ships attacked, one sunk.’ It had apparently been an uneventful North Sea patrol with the crew about to turn back, when a couple of vessels were spotted around Norderney, one of the Frisian Islands off the north-east coast of Germany. ‘They weren’t all that big, but the rule was never to take your bombs back. You always tried to drop them somewhere, to do some damage,’ says Stan. Dennis, his pilot, assessed the situation for a moment or two then made a decision. ‘Okay, we’ll go and attack it.’
Lining up on the vessel, the Irish bomb aimer Laurie Cash was lying prone in the Blenheim’s nose, ready to release the bombs at the precise moment. Stan was in the turret facing rearwards, looking out for a sudden fighter attack. Skimming low over the water at nought feet, he sensed they were nearing the target, when he suddenly felt an impact and the aircraft pull up. Then, the back of his clear Perspex turret went dark. ‘What’s wrong, Dennis?’ he called over the intercom.
‘We’ve hit the bloody thing! Come up and help!’ was the pilot’s urgent reply.
In the split-second timing needed to attack the ship at wave height, Dennis had made a fatal error of judgement, pulled up a fraction too late, and struck the top six feet of the ship’s mast dead centre with the nose. The whole front of the Blenheim, containing Laurie, had been smashed in.
‘It was Laurie’s blood . . . it just . . . sprayed back over the fuselage,’ says Stan, quietly. ‘That’s why my turret went dark.’ He immediately attempted to make his way forward, but the damage had blocked the narrow passage to the front of the aircraft with a wall of twisted metal and armour plate, and he was trapped just behind the pilot’s seat. ‘I couldn’t get through. I could see Laurie in the nose and he was obviously terribly injured, but it was just blocked.’ Something then made Stan look down, and to his horror he saw the surface of the sea rushing past underneath. Like a giant knife, the mast had ripped through the floor of the aircraft, leaving a long gaping tear from the nose to well past the cockpit. ‘God, what’s happened, Dennis?’ Stan said once again.
‘We’ve hit the mast,’ replied Dennis. ‘I can’t see anything.’ Stan’s radio, situated near the floor of the aircraft, was smashed to pieces, as was the aircraft’s compass, and the shattered windscreen ren
dered Dennis’s visibility almost nil. He also suspected the landing gear was now useless.
‘How are you going to get home?’ Stan asked.
Dennis pulled up to gain some height. Apart from a few scratches, he appeared to be unhurt, and the two Mercury engines seemed to be undamaged and running well. The intercom, remarkably, was also working, allowing Stan and Dennis to at least communicate. The navigational charts, however, had been sucked out of the aircraft with the impact, leaving them essentially blind as well as deaf, and with a two-metre length of the ship’s mast, complete with attached ropes and chains, still lodged inside the aircraft.
‘Steer westward,’ said Stan. ‘It’s the only thing you can do. Steer west into the sun. You’re bound to hit England sometime.’
And so, in their crippled aircraft, on they plodded over the North Sea into the sunset, Dennis straining to see any sign of a coast ahead, while also closely watching his diminishing fuel reserves, knowing the aircraft would soon be reaching the edge of its endurance.
‘Eventually, we saw a bit of land in front of us,’ says Stan. After being airborne for six hours and fifteen minutes, they crossed the coast of Northumberland, way to the north of England. They had barely any fuel and there was no sign of an airfield. ‘I have to put it down. I’m out of petrol,’ called Dennis. In a grassy field near a town called Acklington, not far from Newcastle, Dennis came in for a wheels-up landing. ‘The noise was terrible,’ says Stan. ‘Dirt and dust and everything rushing up through the aeroplane.’ But the well-constructed Blenheim stayed in one piece, and Dennis and Stan got out with only a scratch.
Heroes of the Skies Page 9