Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

It was one of Hitler’s great negative achievements that he succeeded in hardening the hearts of men to whom violence was unnatural and repellent. The sense that what they were doing was essential pervaded Bomber Command. Like many others, Michael Scott, a navigator with 110 Squadron, recoiled at the idea of killing yet he had volunteered for the RAF knowing that he was putting himself in exceptional danger. He was a sensitive, music-loving intellectual who taught at Cheam, where the children of the elite were prepared for the best public schools. He wrote short stories and thought of himself as an anarchist. He was sceptical about Britain’s motivations, believing that the desire to ‘retain our spoils from foreign conquests’ outweighed the commitment to freedom. The spectre of a Nazi-ruled world dispelled his doubts. He set out his reasons for joining up in a letter to his father, to be opened in the event of his death.

  ‘Dear Daddy,’ he wrote. ‘You know how I hated the idea of war and that hate will remain with me for ever. What has kept me going is the spiritual force to be derived from music, its reflections of my own feelings and the power it has to uplift the soul above earthly things … now I am off to the source of music and can fulfil all the vague longings of my soul in becoming part of the fountain whence all good comes. I have no belief in a personal God but I do believe most strongly in a spiritual force which was the source of our being and which will be our ultimate goal. If there is anything worth fighting for it is the right to follow our own paths to this goal and to prevent our children from having their souls sterilized by Nazi doctrines … And so I have been fighting.’ Scott was killed during a daylight minelaying trip near Texel on 24 May 1941.3

  Not many of those taking part talked or wrote like Scott. Even though they might have shared his conviction that they were engaged in a fundamental struggle between good and evil, they were unlikely to express such sentiments in public. In the pubs and the canteens the conversation was more likely to be about girls and beer than death and war. It was part of an RAF culture of studied light-heartedness. Reg Fayers lamented the lack of discussion about the aims of the campaign. ‘I feel we should all be alight … with a flame to inspire us on this crusade to save whatever-it-is. But nobody is.’4

  Even Fayers did not claim to know precisely what it was they were fighting for. If anything, it was a desire to maintain a way of life that the Nazis were dedicated to destroying. ‘I’m fighting so that in the future people will have the chance to live as happily as we did all together before the war without interference,’ wrote Eric Rawlings, a twenty-one-year-old from north London, to his parents before his death in 1942. ‘Where young ‘uns like myself could make the most of the marvellous opportunities which you gave me for twenty years and for which I know you made many, many sacrifices. God bless you all and may everything turn out right in the end.’5

  Everyone knew what they were fighting against. The memory of the Blitz persisted as a bitter inspiration long after the German assault had faded out at the end of May 1941. Roy MacDonald, a mid-upper gunner with the PFF, was doing his basic training at Uxbridge when the attacks began. ‘One night I got caught up in it and had to sleep down on Piccadilly platform. The raid was tremendous. Then … I was posted up to West Kirby just in time for the Blitz on Merseyside and so I saw plenty of what they were doing to us … the idea was that if we could keep on doing it back they would pack up or finish the war … I’d no conscience about what we were doing, none at all. I don’t think anybody did. It had to be done. That was the way we looked at it anyway.’6

  After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 the Luftwaffe was able to mount only occasional raids against Britain. These, together with the V1 and V2 rocket attacks of 1944 and 1945, did little damage to the war effort or morale, but they kept the spirit of revenge sharp and bright. Sergeant Bernard Dye, an air gunner with 622 Squadron, lost his best friend in a German raid in April 1942. ‘Nick was my best pal,’ he wrote afterwards.

  We were brought up together and played together. We joined youth organizations and had some good fun. He was liked by all. It was a bright and sunny morning … my pal was on his way to work. He probably was whistling or humming a tune to himself. He was always happy in life. Then it happened, out of the clear blue sky [came] the Nazi bombers … then came the whistle of bombs, red-hot shrapnel was flung far and wide, people fell to the ground and got up no more. My pal Nick was hit in the back, he died some six hours later a lingering death. Nick was a good pal the best you could get. I cannot realize he is gone. When I’m sitting behind my guns I will remember Nick. Nick couldn’t hit back, he was helpless. But I will hit the Huns, hit hard too. I will get my revenge for my dear Pal Nick who was buried today.7

  For George Hull and his crew the violence they were inflicting on Germany was meant personally. Writing to brown-eyed, brown-haired Joan Kirby on 16 February 1944 after returning from Berlin he told her that they always dedicated their ‘cookie’, the biggest bomb in a normal load, ‘to someone or something. There was the first on Berlin, reprisals for John [Joan’s brother killed in a bomber training accident], with an extra on Frankfurt for both John and his Dad. There have been cookies from the people of Australia, the people of Manchester the people of London etc. But tonight’s effort was dedicated to all the brown-eyed brunettes we know (don’t ask me for all their names!).’

  Ten days later he was on his way to Schweinfurt when the route took him over London while a raid was in progress. It made him ‘burn with rage … I thought of your folks and mine underneath it all and I would not have turned back if we had caught fire.’ Hull’s decency caused him to reflect on the ‘ultimate futility of all this slaughter’. But such thoughts were stifled easily by his hatred of the German regime. ‘I never lose sight of the fact that if our feelings rule our judgement we might suffer terrible consequences. Think of it. Nazis in Britain, desecrating our land, destroying those beautiful things that you and I hold dear, fouling our women in brothels, wholesale slaughter – perhaps your dad shot for not obeying an order or my mother forced to billet German officers while suffering insults. It’s true. Can you see the Nazis sparing Britain, the country above all which held out against them and turned the tables?’

  He was writing having just landed and was suffering from a ‘post ops headache’. He felt ‘washed out completely and as usual fed up to the back teeth.’ But glowing through the fog of weariness there is a burning determination to carry on. ‘Of course I hate the job but idealism is not enough. I am fighting for the people I love and the boys who have already paid the full price. To give in to matters on ideological grounds is to let them all down.’8

  The campaign could, in one sense, be regarded as a continuous act of retribution for those who had died, on the ground and in the air. The survivors felt a strong impulse to avenge dead comrades. By striking back they were exacting a price for their loss and investing it with value and meaning. ‘There was [this] feeling that those who were left would carry on,’ said Jim Berry, a Pathfinder pilot.9 One bomber from 467 Squadron was named ‘Jock’s Revenge’ after a flight engineer who had been killed while flying in her. As he dropped his bombs on Duisburg on his first mission, Ken Newman thought of his ‘brother-in-law Victor and his now fatherless son’. Victor had been killed in a Halifax over Magdeburg, leaving behind a wife who was five months pregnant.10

  Berlin’s heavy defences and great distance away made it an unpopular target. But there was some satisfaction in knowing that they were bringing the war to the Führer’s front door. ‘There was something special about attacking the Big City,’ wrote Peter Johnson. ‘The feelings were partly … fuelled by the picture of Hitler himself, cowering there below in his bunker.’11

  But it was not Hitler who was suffering. Looking down from his rear gunner’s turret at the towns and villages of Lincolnshire as he headed off to bomb Böhlen, Cy March could not help comparing the tiny figures in the streets below to those he was going to attack. ‘We took off … vowing to do as much damage to Germany as we could. We set course to th
e East and I noticed that over this [part of the] country the blackout wasn’t so good, doors opening etc. I got to wondering about the people below us, going for a pint, meeting a bird for the flicks, and the people we were going to. Probably doing the same, but in for a nasty shock.’12

  By the end of 1942 no one was in any doubt about the effect the bombs were having. It was not hard to imagine how the victims felt. Tom Wingham, a navigator with 102 Squadron, remembered looking down on his first trip to the Ruhr. ‘It was quite a ghastly sight to see the amount of flame and explosions … I made up my mind that if ever I had to bale out over the target, I wouldn’t. I would rather go down with the aircraft because I was sure that if you landed in that, the populace would tear you to bits.’13

  Some commanders, like Harry Yates’s New Zealander CO Jack Leslie, seemed to revel in the damage they were doing. ‘I want you to really burn this place,’ he told 75 Squadron before an operation on the Lens marshalling yards in the summer of 1944, signing off with: ‘See you in the smoke.’ These last five words, Yates remembered, ‘were to become very familiar to us. Some of Jack Leslie’s more gung-ho briefings could be strong meat. Exhortations to blast this and burn that and descriptions of the enemy as vermin or bastards left no doubt about the CO’s fighting spirit or the commitment he required from his men.’14

  Some crews appreciated the bloodthirsty approach. Doug Mourton of 102 Squadron remembered that ‘the first time we were given a civilian target to bomb I must say that the majority of the aircrew there raised a cheer because I suppose so many of them had come from towns that [had suffered]. Many of them probably had relations that had been killed in the indiscriminate German bombing and they were very pleased to be doing the same thing.’

  Mourton did not share this attitude. As his tour progressed he grew increasingly uneasy about what he was doing. At one point he thought of refusing to fly ‘because I hadn’t volunteered to incinerate women and children.’ He was persuaded to carry on by the argument that ‘this type of bombing … would make the war end quicker and … more lives would be saved than sacrificed.’15 Willie Lewis was also tempted to revolt when on 29 May 1943 he learned that the target for the night was Wuppertal, thirty miles south of Essen. The briefing officer did not disguise the fact that it was crammed with refugees from the Battle of the Ruhr. According to his account he informed his skipper John Maze that he had ‘a good mind not to come’.

  He told him that ‘up to now, I’ve kidded myself that I was fighting a man’s war risking my neck killing men and being shot at in return but what the hell do they call this? It’s deliberate murder of the sort that we’ve called the Jerries names for for the last three years.’ He felt strongly the ‘confounded hypocrisy’ of the situation. ‘There’s that Air Marshal type talking on the radio telling everyone what brutes the Germans are and how we wouldn’t dream of doing anything like it ourselves and yet we arrange a trip like this.’ Maze, with his usual pragmatism, replied that by refusing to go he would be ‘branded as yellow, that’s all’ and declared to be lacking in moral fibre. Lewis bowed to his skipper’s worldly logic, blustering that he would ‘never pretend that we are nice clean little boys doing a respectable job from now on. We are only mean bastards taking orders from a bunch of hypocrites.’16 Lewis’s premonitions about Wuppertal were well founded. The town was only lightly defended. The PFF marking was excellent and the incendiaries that whistled down on the flares sparked a minor firestorm which burned down 80 per cent of the built-up area. About 3,800 people were killed, almost all of them civilians.

  Lewis’s finer feelings were eclipsed by the horrors of the trip. At one point T-Tommy was coned by searchlights but managed to wriggle free. Another Halifax half a mile in front was not so lucky. Watching the flak bursting around the doomed aircraft as a fighter hosed it with cannon fire Lewis felt a guilty thrill of relief that they had escaped, then foolish as he remembered that only that morning he had ‘been feeling sorry for the Germans’.17

  As he had pointed out, it was sometimes difficult to overlook the similarities between the crimes with which the Germans were constantly charged and some of Bomber Command’s activities. Charles Patterson, now flying a Mosquito for the RAF Film Unit, was tasked with taking cine pictures of the immediate aftermath of a daylight raid on a steelworks at Denain in northern France. At his group commander’s suggestion he also dropped some bombs of his own. There were different delays on the fuses from half an hour to twenty-four hours. ‘If a German had done it to us,’ he said later, ‘we would have said [it was] frightfully caddish and wicked and unsporting. But when we did it to the Germans it was considered rather clever and imaginative.’18

  The demands of operational life did not encourage reflection. Johnny Jones, a rear gunner with 467 Squadron, found his conscience stirring as he bombed Munich on the night of 7/8 January 1945. ‘It must have been hell on earth for the poor devils down below,’ he wrote in his dairy. ‘Mass murder. Whole families wiped out no doubt. I could not help but think when the bombs left the a/c [aircraft] what a terrible thing I am doing. It must be wrong.’ Five weeks later he took part in the great raid on Dresden. On this occasion his diary records only that the ‘damage done must have been colossal’.19

  Sitting in a prisoner of war camp with almost nothing to do, protracted contemplation came more easily. Geoffrey Willatt, taken prisoner after being shot down on his way to Mannheim on the night of 5/6 September 1943, ended up in Stalag-Luft 3 near Bremen. In the spring of 1944 he noted in his diary the deteriorating behaviour of one of his friends. ‘Suddenly George seems much worse and I hadn’t realized how bad he was till one day he took me to a secluded place and burst into tears! It appears, or at least he says, that at the beginning of the war he nearly turned conscientious objector and now worries about all the women and children he’s killed … he began by being vague and preoccupied, then was unable to concentrate on anything, had a short period of religion which did him no good at all and then a period of self-persecution (cold showers, running round the circuit till exhausted etc.).’

  Willatt diagnosed an acute case of ‘barbed wire psychosis’ and asked him why the deaths he had caused weighed on his mind ‘when there are thousands of other aircrew prisoners who don’t worry. I tell him he must live a useful life after the war but his mind won’t now function enough to argue it all.’

  Despite the well-intentioned interventions of the other prisoners in his hut George’s mental condition continued to deteriorate. ‘No one dare look at him because it gives him a hunted feeling & yet everyone is being too kind to him – an embarrassing feeling for him I know and no help.’ He spent a few days in the camp hospital but seemed even worse on his return. ‘He walked up and down the room five steps each way for half an hour with his head in his hands. We take it in turns to follow him when he goes out – so afraid that he’ll jump over the wire and get shot.’ Eventually George was taken away to the German mental hospital at Lamsdorf with two other prisoners.

  Willatt’s recipe for staying sane was exercise and the suppression of barren reflection. ‘I haven’t yet heard of a person going “round the bend” who took part regularly in games,’ he noted after George was taken away. As for guilt, it was pointless debating the rights and wrongs until the war was over.20

  Peter Johnson was in a persistent anguish of doubt about what he was doing. He was born in 1909, joined the RAF in 1930 and lived through the fear and moral confusion that accompanied the rise of the dictators. He had struggled against the anti-German feeling that gripped Britain in the pre-war years, an attitude that survived even the invasion of Poland, but not the attack on the Low Countries. After that he ‘hated Hitler and hated the Germans who loved him’.

  Nonetheless the first ‘thousand’ raids made him uneasy. They seemed to have more in common with the Blitz than the precision attacks like the raid on the Renault works at Billancourt, the event that had inspired him to volunteer for ops. A book of drawings by a Polish refugee, Joseph Bato, tugged
at his conscience. They were simple, understated sketches of London districts just after the Germans had visited. One showed a terraced house whose front had been torn away, ‘exposing to the street the shattered remains of the quiet, decent life that went on in [it].’

  Writing to his girlfriend Shelagh in the summer of 1943 Johnson voiced his hesitation in language that revealed the depth of his doubt.

  Of course the Royal Air Force aims for military objectives, but … I swear to you my sweet, that nothing that ever happened in London in any way approached what I saw in Dortmund … no German pilot ever looked down on London and saw the obscene red mass of flames that was Dortmund last month or Hamburg last week. And this is only the beginning, for nothing can stop us now. Nothing but the end of the war can stop the destruction of practically every city in Germany, destruction that will make Bato’s drawings look like the record of a peevish child bored with its bricks.

  On one occasion Johnson let his feelings slip in public. Shortly after taking over 49 Squadron in April 1943 he was summoned to 5 Group headquarters near Grantham to look after a VIP guest. The visitor was Sir Kingsley Wood, the chancellor of the exchequer, who had served as secretary of state for air before the war. Johnson’s job was to take him through each step of a raid. Wood was to stay at the base until the aircraft had returned and the crews were debriefed. During the evening he was shown some reconnaissance photographs taken after an attack on Düsseldorf a few weeks previously. The chancellor, a cheerful, Pickwickian figure, seemed very satisfied with what he saw. Johnson had viewed a few post-ops photos but nothing like these. ‘Seen through the stereoscopic glass the detail was staggeringly clear, showing just rows and rows of apparently empty boxes which had been houses. They had no roofs or content. This had been a crowded residential area, long streets of terraced houses in an orderly right-angled arrangement, covering virtually the whole of the six-inch square photograph. There were one or two open spaces but the chief impression was just those rows and rows of empty shells, a huge dead area where once thousands of human beings had lived.’