PILOT: Yes, I can see it.
BOMB-AIMER: Round to port the heading is, skipper.
PILOT: OK.
BOMB-AIMER: If we press on a bit this way we might get out.
PILOT: Yeah.
(There is a thump thump thump from passing flak shells.)
PILOT: You could light your fag on any of those.
(The thumping intensifies.)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Wow, that was a bit close.
NAVIGATOR: (matter-of-factly): I think we’ve been hit, personally.
PILOT: [We’ll] lose a bit of height.
NAVIGATOR: That was close.
PILOT: Yeah.
BOMB-AIMER: Searchlights looking for us now. We’re pressing on more or less on course.
PILOT: Righty ho.
NAVIGATOR: We’d better press on north until we’re clear of this issue.
PILOT: Yes, that’s what I’m doing.
(Thump thump.)
BOMB-AIMER: Hallo skipper. We’ve been holed in the front here. There’s oil leaking out of the front turret but it’s nothing to worry about.
PILOT: OK… (To the flight engineer) Could you glance over the temperatures of the engines?
FLIGHT ENGINEER: Could I what?
PILOT: Glance over the temperatures … Were we smack on the target today?
BOMB-AIMER: I don’t think so. Searchlight on you.
NAVIGATOR: It seemed to be all right to me.
BOMB-AIMER: There’s a few searchlights ahead, about a hundred.
NAVIGATOR: It all goes to show, there’s only one way to attack this place and that’s through cloud.
PILOT: Yeah.
NAVIGATOR: By God, I’ve never seen anything like this before.
BOMB-AIMER: Neither have I.
PILOT: Four thousand-pounder just gone off, good show.
NAVIGATOR: That’s not bad at all.
(The thumping intensifies.)
PILOT: Yes, it’s not a bad prang.34
The world of Bomber Command was brought to the stage by Terence Rattigan, who left his career as a playwright at the start of the war to join the RAF as a wireless operator/air gunner. Flare Path was first performed in London in August 1942 a few months after the first ‘thousand’ raids. The action takes place in the residents’ lounge of the Falcon Hotel in the fictional Lincolnshire town of Milchester, where wives stay to be near their men at the neighbouring bomber base. The play centres on Pat, an actress before the war, and her husband Flight Lieutenant Teddy Graham whom she married in haste during a week-long leave. She is visited by Peter Kyle, a British film star and former lover. Kyle wants her back. She is greatly tempted. Her feelings are tested when Teddy is sent off on a last-minute mission. During the long hours of waiting Pat realizes where her duty lies and in the morning tells Kyle she will not be leaving with him. ‘I used to think that our private happiness was something far too important to be affected by outside things, like the war or marriage vows,’ she says. ‘It may be just my bad luck, but I’m in that battle, and I can’t … desert.’
The man she is standing by is a refreshing contrast to the Hollywood sophisticate, Kyle. He is gauche, innocent and friendly and totally lacking in pretension, full of Gellhorn’s ‘humble jokes’. He feels strong affection for his rear gunner Sergeant David ‘Dusty’ Miller, a former London bus conductor, and the feeling is returned. But Teddy is more complicated than he seems. After returning from the raid he breaks down, stricken by ‘plain bloody funk’. He blurts out to his wife his fear of being grounded for Lack of Moral Fibre which he describes as ‘the official phrase for – no guts’. This was probably the first public admission that such a designation existed. The play was also frank about losses. One of the bombers crashes on take-off while the wives are watching from the hotel and the BBC reports a heavy toll on the radio news.35
There was no attempt to censor Flare Path. The Air Ministry thoroughly approved of its message and when it opened at the Apollo Theatre most of the RAF’s top brass were there. The play was ultimately concerned with sacrifice and sacrifice was the positive side of loss, for it suggested that the dying was worth it. This was the theme of Noël Coward, who was proving himself a master at arousing and distilling the nation’s sentiments, in a poem that generated a powerful emotional charge. There is no mention of the Germans. The emphasis instead is on the selflessness of the crews, droning overhead as the rest of Britain lies abed.
Lie in the dark and listen
It’s clear tonight so they’re flying high,
Hundreds of them, thousands perhaps,
Riding the icy, moonlit sky.
Men, machinery, bombs and maps,
Altimeters and guns and charts,
Coffee, sandwiches, fleece-lined boots
Bones and muscles and minds and hearts
English saplings with English roots
Deep in the earth they’ve left below,
Lie in the dark and let them go,
Lie in the dark and listen …
Jack Currie found it ‘succinct and stylish but … slightly blush-making.’ He spoke for many when he recorded later that ‘largely unmoved by exhortation, praise or condemnation, I satisfied what need I had for motivation by the companionship of the men from far-off lands around me, and the sight of the cathedral and the wide, green fields.’36
Most of the effort to explain Bomber Command to the outside world had little effect on what those within it were thinking or doing. It was as Currie said. The horizons of their universe rarely stretched beyond the crew and the aircraft and the next operation. If they needed an overarching belief to sustain them it was the thought that every successful attack brought victory, and above all peace, a little closer. That gave point to the terrible work they were doing. ‘Did you notice what your husband did to Hannover by any chance?’ Reg Fayers asked his wife after a major raid on 8/9 October 1943. ‘War’s end is much nearer ’cos of Bomber Command.’
9
The Battle
Harris liked to present the campaign as a series of ‘battles’. It was a commonplace word to describe a strange and completely novel form of fighting. The crews were often struck by the oddness of the war they were waging. They attacked, at night, an enemy they could not see. Their targets were not soldiers or fellow-aviators but buildings, and inevitably, those who lived in them. The engagements were brief and fought far away. There was nothing connecting them to the battlefield. It was a war they visited, then left.
‘Life on the squadron was seldom far from fantasy,’ wrote Don Charlwood. ‘We might, at eight, be in a chair beside a fire, but at ten in an empty world above a floor of cloud. Or at eight, walking in Barnetby with a girl whose nearness denied all possibility of sudden death at twelve.’1
Roy MacDonald, a mid-upper gunner with the Pathfinder Force, found it ‘a Jekyll and Hyde experience’. After finishing an operation ‘it was funny, if you weren’t on the night following, to be able to just ride your bike among the fields and think, well it’s not many hours since we were in another completely different world, and just thinking once or twice about friends who hadn’t come back. It was … schizophrenic.’2
Even in battle it was possible to feel disengaged. Reg Fayers, the gentle 78 Squadron navigator who had questioned Harris when he visited Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, described the sensation in a letter written to his wife Phyllis in the summer of 1943. ‘Lately in letters I’ve mentioned that I’ve flown by night and that I’ve been tired by day, but I haven’t said that I can now claim battle honours – Krefeld, Mülheim, Gelsenkirchen, Wuppertal and Cologne. I suppose I’ve been fighting in the Battle of the Ruhr. But it hasn’t felt like that.’
Like many he was surprised at the emotional distance he felt from those he was bombing. ‘It’s aloof and impersonal, this air war. One has no time to think of [the] hell happening below to a set of people who are the same as you except that their thinking has gone a bit haywire. It’s a fair assumption that when Tom [the bomb-aimer] dropped our
bombs the other night, women and boys and girls were killed and cathedrals damaged. It must have been so. Were it more personal, I should be more regretting I suppose. But I sit up there with my charts and my pencils and I don’t see a thing. I never look out. In five raids all I’ve seen is a cone of searchlights up by Amsterdam.’3
Fayers was shut away in his ‘office’, curtained off from the sights of the battlefield. As a pilot, Peter Johnson had no choice but to see what was happening but he too found there was something unreal about the spectacle. ‘The defences which threatened us were visible enough, the twinkling of innumerable shells exploding in the barrage, the probing fingers of the searchlights, the constant threat from fighters against whom we had little defence. All these we knew but we were not really fighting against them, we were simply trying to evade them. And our own part in the fighting was quickly over. In the glare of searchlights, with the occasional winking of anti-aircraft shells, the occasional thud when one came close and left its vile smell, what we had to do was search for coloured lights dropped by our own people, aim our bombs at them and get away.’ The use of target indicators meant that it was easy to forget that the bombs were falling on people and buildings. ‘The crux of our every operation,’ he wrote, ‘lay in the few minutes when the bomb-aimer kept the clear, beautiful colour of a target indicator in his sights, gave his directions and ultimately loosed our load at a firework …’4
Mounting a raid was a complex business requiring enormous thought, skill and effort. The many variables made each one different. However by the middle of 1943 a routine had been established. Each morning the crews of each squadron woke with no knowledge of what the night would bring. The big decisions were taken far away at Harris’s headquarters at High Wycombe, west of London, then passed on to the commanders of the formations that would carry out the attacks.
By now there were seven front-line groups. Number 1 was equipped entirely with Lancasters and operated from Yorkshire. The light bombers of Number 2 Group were removed from Bomber Command in May 1943 and attached to the American Second Tactical Air Force in preparation for D-Day; 3 Group had Lancasters and was based in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. The airfields housing 4 Group, equipped with Halifaxes, were in the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire; 5 Group had a mixture of Lancasters and twin-engined Mosquitoes, the sleek, fast beauties of the air war, used for target-marking as well as for precision attacks. It was centred on south Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Airmen of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) made up the personnel of 6 Group, which operated out of the North Riding and County Durham. The Pathfinder Force was designated as 8 Group and flew Lancasters and Mosquitoes from airfields around Ely in the Cambridge fens. The last group, 100, was sited in north Norfolk and used American Liberators and Flying Fortresses to fly radio and electronic counter-measure missions to jam the German radar during operations.
Crews would hear after breakfast from their flight commanders whether they would be operating that night. If not, an empty day lay ahead. Their job was unlike any other military occupation. Frank Blackman, an Englishman who flew with 429 Canadian Bomber Squadron, explained to his girlfriend Mary that ‘aircrew are not like anybody else in the services. They are qualified to fly and damn-all else.’5 NCOs and junior officers had no men to lead and no other duties but their operational ones. Free days were welcome if they followed a heavy period of raids. But the necessity of completing thirty trips in order to finish a tour and escape from front-line duties meant most were anxious to hurry on and get it over with. Don Charlwood was stationed at Elsham Wolds in the exposed north-west of Lincolnshire when freezing fog shut the airfield down. ‘The fog remains,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘the intense cold and stillness remain; the sun has gone for ever. No ops now for ten days. This is not as pleasant as it sounds. Thirty ops must be done and until they are done the pressure is on. These long gaps give one too much time to think.’ There was much to think about. At the time of writing he and his crew had ‘still seen no one reach thirty’.6 In winter, cancellations were routine. Very often they came at the last minute, as commanders hung on waiting for the weather to improve.
Invariably, this deflated crew spirits. An RAF report into operational stress written in August 1942 spoke of ‘the disastrous effects upon morale of repeated cancellation of sorties, especially when late in the day.’ One of the squadron commanders consulted ‘said that “last-minute scrubbing” was the most demoralizing factor with which he had to contend in managing an operational squadron.’ He would ‘much rather send his squadron on a raid even with 10/10 cloud over the target than subject them to the disappointment, frustration and demoralization of last-minute cancellation due to weather conditions …’ Frustration was more likely to be generated by a desire to get an ordeal over with than a yearning to have a crack at the enemy. But it was real and damaging enough. A station medical officer quoted in the report told of a freshman who was ‘scrubbed seventeen times before he got his first trip. He only lasted three trips after this, and then said he had had it.’7
If ops were on, the destination was first revealed to those that most needed to know – the station, squadron and flight commanders and flying control officer. Most of the airmen had to wait until the afternoon to find out where they were going. In the meantime they checked the serviceability of their aircraft, perhaps taking it for a test flight, and passed the time afterwards reading, trying to get some sleep or writing letters. The target was first revealed to the pilots and navigators at a preliminary afternoon briefing. There were specialist briefings for wireless operators and bomb-aimers. Then there was a general gathering for all taking part.
Freshman crews, virgins on their first missions, might feel a thrill of anticipation, even pleasure as they prepared for the evening’s events, happy in the thought that all their training was finally going to be put to use. The usual sensation, though, was a low buzz of dread that could only be dispelled by action. Don Charlwood, on hearing that he was about to embark on his first trip, felt an odd mixture of excitement and fear. ‘The mood about us changed to something elating but strangely unpleasant, as though suddenly we had been stripped to spiritual nakedness. Half-laughingly men [went off] to write last letters.’8
Bomber Command’s rapid professional evolution meant that by 1944 preparations were exceptionally thorough. The main briefing took place a few hours before take-off. The 120 or so squadron members taking part in a typical raid filed into the briefing room, usually a utilitarian hut, after being checked at the door by an RAF Police NCO, and sat down in the rows of chairs or forms, each crew clustering around its skipper. Within a few minutes a haze of cigarette and pipe smoke hung in the rafters. They came to attention as the station and squadron commanders strode in and mounted a low dais where a map was propped on a stand, hidden by a blackout curtain. With the announcement ‘Gentlemen, your target for tonight is …’ the CO whipped away the cover and revealed their destination. An ominous red tape on the chart marked the route from base to target. The least welcome objectives were the Ruhr – ‘Happy Valley’ – and the ‘Big City’ as Harris called Berlin. Roy MacDonald hated the thought of the Ruhr. ‘When they shut the door and pulled the curtain away from the board to show you where you were going I used to die. My heart used to leap out of my chest.’9
Bad news was often met by yelled expletives and cat-calls, and sometimes with mournful humour. ‘With a deft flick of the wrist, the CO uncovered the wall map behind him,’ wrote Harry Yates. “‘Gentlemen,” he began as always. “The target for tonight is … Kiel.” As always the gentlemen responded with groans … but one bright spark shouted out, “Sir, can we be excused. I promised to meet my girlfriend at eight o’clock.”’ It was a well-worn joke, but founded in truth. Many an airman had a date he would not turn up to, that or any other night.10
The squadron leader then handed over to the senior intelligence officer (SIO) who assessed the importance of the target and explained why it was to be attacked. He, sometimes
she, as it was not unusual for WAAF officers to hold intelligence posts, gave details of previous raids and explained why it had been chosen. The SIO also revealed what was known about flak and searchlight positions which were marked on the map with red and green celuloid overlays. Any ‘spy’ rash enough to use the first person plural when describing the operation ahead was instantly met with shouts of ‘What do you mean “we”?’
The squadrons had specialist leaders for each aircrew role who now gave their own briefings. The navigators were taken again over the route and given the turning points. Frequent diversions were commonplace to keep the German defences guessing about the intended target. The wireless operators were reminded of the frequencies of the night. The bombing leader detailed the payloads and the ratio of high explosive to incendiaries and explained the timing and phasing of the attack and colours of the target indicators and aiming point markers. The meteorological officer then gave details of wind speeds, cloud conditions and the weather likely to be encountered over the target.
The RAF had started the war with poor quality bombs that were more metal than charge and that frequently failed to go off. In the spring of 1941 they began to be replaced by a new series of High Capacity (HC) blast bombs, led by the 4,000-pound ‘cookie’, a fat, green-painted cylinder which appeared to have no aerodynamic qualities whatsoever. They were supplemented with Medium Capacity (MC) bombs which came in sizes of 500, 1,000 and 4,000 pounds. These were mixed with incendiaries. The most common was the hexagonal 4-pound version of which Bomber Command dropped nearly eighty million. As the war progressed, the recipe for the bomb mix changed. In 1940, incendiaries made up only about 5 per cent of the load. During the Battles of the Ruhr and, later, Berlin, the proportion was closer to 66 per cent. The blast bombs blew buildings apart. The incendiaries set fire to the debris. It was this devastating cocktail that caused the Hamburg firestorm and those that followed it.
The CO wound up the meeting with some words of encouragement. In some squadrons, it was the practice for the padre to say a prayer before the final preparations began.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 71