Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  He put the last, fatal touches to the encounter with a burst that set the port outer engine on fire, only breaking off when he ran out of ammunition. The bomber was by then doomed. Pietrek lined up alongside and watched it slide to earth. He found it a ‘strangely beautiful sight, the big black bird … well comrade, your fate is sealed. That will be clear to you chaps inside that wounded bird too.’23

  Sometimes high-flying aircraft dropped flares to help the night-fighters see their targets. The feeling of exposure was appalling. Cy March was well on his way to Böhlen when ‘suddenly a string of flares lit up above us, lightening the sky into daylight … they continued until there was a double row for miles on our track. We knew fighters were dropping them, but where were they, behind, above or below the flares? Our eyes must have been like saucers looking for them. It was like walking down a well-lit road in the nude.’ They were saved by a signal aborting the mission and dived away for the cover of darkness and home.24 The sky was full of nasty surprises. Some crews reported seeing mysterious bursts of flame. The authorities explained them away as ‘scarecrows’, designed to frighten crews, though the likelihood is that they were exploding aircraft.

  Despite the weight of the German defences it was to possible to reach the target area without encountering fighters. Some gunners completed a tour without ever seeing a German aircraft or firing their guns in anger. It was just as well. The turrets were fitted with Browning .303s which took rifle-calibre bullets and had a short range. They became even less effective after the Luftwaffe improved the armour on its fighters. They offered very little protection to the bombers and perhaps their main value was as a psychological deterrent.

  In these unequal circumstances, if a gunner spotted a fighter he was wise to hold his fire. During his tour as a rear gunner Edward Twinn ‘never fired a shot because if you did then that immediately gave your position away to other fighters who were in the area who couldn’t see you and they would come straight in, pinpoint you and that was it. More often than not if you did open fire it was the last thing you did.’25

  The first sign that the fighters had found a victim was often a small fire in the blackness ahead, followed by a huge explosion as the bomb load went up. It was an experience that produced conflicting emotions. There was horror, pity, but above all thankfulness that it had happened to someone else.

  The fighters posed an intermittent threat all the way out and all the way back and shot down more bombers than did the flak batteries defending the towns. In the last three months of 1943, fighters caused the loss of 250 aircraft whereas flak was responsible for downing only ninety-four.26 Nonetheless, it was during the twenty or so minutes over the target that the crews felt in the greatest peril.

  By the middle of 1943 most area raids ran to a standard pattern. During the raid on Duisburg on the night of 12 May, 238 Lancasters, 142 Halifaxes, 112 Wellingtons and 70 Stirlings took part, led by 10 Mosquitoes of the PFF. They approached the target at staggered heights and intervals. The bottom layer of the stream flew at 15,000 feet, the middle at 18,000 and the top at 20,000–22,000 feet. Each level was two minutes behind the other. On the outward and inward journeys the middle of the bomber stream felt a safe place to be and the turbulence caused by the surrounding aircraft was reassuring. Above the objective the proximity of your comrades became a menace. At Duisburg, all 572 aircraft flew over the target in about twenty-five minutes. Those at the lowest level faced the greatest danger, not only from flak but also from the bombs falling from above. Initially there had been fears that such concentration would lead inevitably to collisions. In practice, the discipline of the pilots meant that mid-air crashes were surprisingly rare.

  Arrival in the target area was signalled by searchlights probing the sky, followed by the blossoming of anti-aircraft fire. It was a daunting sight. On the approach to Hamburg and Berlin, it seemed to Doug Mourton that ‘the anti-aircraft was so concentrated that from fifty miles away it looked impossible to get through it’.27 The switch from the cold comfort of the dark to the obscene brightness of the battlefield was shocking. Peter Johnson, approaching Essen on his first operation, noted how alone his aircraft felt, ‘suspended in a black vacuum’, with nothing to be seen except the yellow flares dropped by the Pathfinders to show where to turn on to the target. But then ‘instead of the pitch darkness there was suddenly a mass of searchlights, slowly, methodically scanning the sky over a huge area. At the same time streams of tracer, some white, some coloured, followed the searchlight beams at quite low heights … lastly, at levels from well above our height to four or five thousand feet below came a dazzling display of twinkling stars, the Ruhr barrage of heavy ack-ack. There seemed to be hundreds of bursts almost simultaneously. You were quite unconscious of the invisible but lethal load of shrapnel each burst vomited into the sky.’28

  Doug Mourton, on his first trip to Cologne, could see the flak all too clearly, ‘pieces of luminous metal … not only luminous but looking as if they were on fire’ that thudded into the side of the aircraft.29 The once empty-seeming sky was suddenly full of horrifying sights. As the Pathfinder pilot Jim Berry began his bombing run over Kiel one night ‘the sky got quite a glow on. I felt that we were on fire because I could see this red glow everywhere. I looked around and everything was bathed in this red glow but no one said anything.’ Then he noticed the cause of the strange effect. ‘Just above and to the starboard side was a Lancaster … It was ablaze from end to end. It was a terrible sight and it was not very far away. He was slightly higher than we were and I thought if he falls my way I will have time to get away.’ Eventually ‘it just fell away to the starboard side and away from me so that was fine. But it was an awful thing to see. I didn’t see anybody get out.’30

  In these last, climactic moments Don Charlwood was sometimes struck by the madness of what he was doing. As he flew, crouched at his navigator’s station, into a blizzard of flak above Bremen he ‘looked at the commonplace things on my desk – pencils, a scribbling block, a pear ripened in the Staffordshire sun – and suddenly I thought of them as wonderfully sane, inanimate though they were.’31

  The point of the searchlights was to dazzle the pilot and bomb-aimer and light up the bomber for the flak batteries. Once the radar-guided master searchlight, tinted an unearthly blue, picked up an aircraft it was joined by others so that the intruder was caught in a cone of dazzling light and became the object of the attentions of every gun within range. The effect was hideously disorientating and unnerving for the crews. To Roy MacDonald it was like ‘a thousand flashlights going off at the same time. It was blinding.’32

  Once ‘coned’ the only way out was to corkscrew. Peter Johnson’s first experience of it was over Stettin. ‘The near-blindness induced by eight or ten of these very high-powered beams coming from every side produced the frightening sensation of being caged by light. No matter how you struggled the dazzling beams would hold you and you lost all sense of movement. It was as if you were motionless in the sky, shells exploding all around you, waiting for the one which would destroy you, knowing that every fighter in the area had marked you for his prey.’

  Johnson warned the crew to stand by to corkscrew. But it seemed the searchlights ‘were locked on to us like a vice and, pull and push the control column as I would, taking us into the steepest dives and climbs I dared risk, they clung to us as if they were glued to our shape. The rear gunner warned of an aircraft following us but I was already doing the most violent manoeuvres of which I and the aircraft were capable. Then suddenly one of the searchlights left us and then another and another … somehow their co-ordination had been upset though three or four still held us.’ Sweating, and with his aching arms, forearms and wrists, he ‘kept the throttles at maximum and, miraculously, they lost us. Still close, the beams kept brushing over our wings, probing, probing until suddenly, they went out all together. It was a queer sensation to be back in the merciful dark.’33

  The bomber stream followed the Pathfinder crews whose job was
to illuminate the target area with flares, then to drop brilliantly coloured red, green and yellow target indicators (TIs) on the aiming point. The task of the main force was to place their bombs on whichever colour marker they had been allocated by the master bombers, who began to operate from August 1943. The job of the master bomber was extraordinarily dangerous, even by Bomber Command’s extreme standards. They circled the bombing zone, observing the fall of the bombs, all the while issuing instructions and corrections to the crews by radio telephone.

  Whatever the terrors of the initial approach, nothing matched the dread-filled minutes of the bombing run. To deliver their loads pilots had to fly straight and level allowing the aimer to line up his sight on the marker he had been allocated burning below. The finale was signalled by a blast of freezing air which flooded the fuselage as the bomb doors opened. For the next minutes the bomb-aimer took control, lying face-down in the nose and calling adjustments to the course of the final approach to the skipper over the intercom. The captain, in turn, was taking direction from the master bomber. This was the ‘tinny voice’ in Willie Lewis’s taut description of the climax of T-Tommy’s trip to Gelsenkirchen on the night of 9 July 1943.

  In the nose … Joe is lying stretched over his bombsight the illuminated cross of which is in line with the town coming up. He is speaking.

  Joe (quietly): ‘Bomb doors open, skipper.’

  John: ‘Bomb doors open.’ (He pulls a lever on his left. There is a jerk and the aircraft settles down again.) ‘I’ll put on the radio telephone.’ (He presses a switch on the panel and a tinny voice comes over the intercom.)

  Voice: ‘Come right in, chaps. It’s not a bit dangerous. Bomb on the red flare.’

  Joe (Cutting across the voice.): ‘Left, left, skipper.’

  John: ‘Left, left.’ (The aircraft jerks slightly to port. The illuminated cross on the bombsight lines up towards a flare halfway down.)

  Joe: ‘Left, left.’

  John: ‘Left, left.’ (The aircraft moves again and the flare starts coming down the line towards the centre of the cross. Joe’s thumb tenses on the button.)

  Voice: ‘There’s a very good line in yellow just gone down. Bomb on the yellow.’

  John: ‘Can you see that yellow, Joe?’

  Joe: ‘Yes, skipper. Straighten up. I think I can manage it.’ … (Crashing as ack-ack explodes around them, rocking the aircraft violently.)

  Joe: ‘Right, right, skipper.’

  John: ‘Right, right.’

  Rammy (rear gunner): ‘You’ll have to get moving full kick as soon as the bombs are gone, skipper. It’s getting bloody hot back here. The flak’s very close.’

  John: ‘Shut up.’

  Joe: (Presses the button and the aircraft leaps into the air as the load leaves.) ‘Bombs gone’.34

  To be a master bomber required tungsten nerves and supernatural composure. One master bomber who was hit while over the target calmly broadcast that he was on fire and going down. He wished the main force crews good luck before disappearing from the air waves. Their detached interventions were not always appreciated, coming as they did when every member of every crew was straining to get in and out in the fastest possible time. Jack Currie was in one of 300 Lancasters, flying in a concentrated wave over the centre of Berlin on 3 September 1943. As it approached the target, ‘the PFF marker flares began to blossom on the ground. On the radio the circling master bomber passed instructions to the attackers. On the whole his words were cool and helpful, but he fell from grace with one slightly patronizing remark, which invited a harsh response and got it.

  “‘Come on in main force, the searchlights won’t bite you!” Few were the transmit buttons left unpressed, few were the bomber captains who did not reply: “F … off!”’35

  As the cookie fell away the bombers performed a great leap upward that sent relief and hope surging through the hearts of the crew. There was still one task left. Harris had insisted on the need for a photograph to be taken over the area where the bombs were supposed to have landed. The six-photograph sequence took another thirty seconds, moments, wrote Willie Lewis, of ‘stark, fierce terror’.

  With the last click of the camera the job was finally done but several hours of mortal danger still lay ahead. As they left the target area and its umbrella of flak the night-fighters were waiting for a second bite at their quarry. Flying Officer Geoffrey Willatt, a bomb-aimer with 106 Squadron, had only two more trips to complete his tour when on the night of 5/6 September 1943 he was sent to bomb Mannheim.

  ‘At last I said “bombs gone” and the aircraft bounced up as the cookie went,’ he wrote in his diary a few weeks later. ‘A further period straight and level while the photo is taken and then we turned off. The air seemed full of aircraft and quite near a squirt of cannon fire streamed through the air like a string of sausages and we drift through puffs of smoke from nearby bursts of flak. A Halifax with one wing on fire charged past our nose losing height in a shallow dive.’ His skipper, Pilot Officer ‘Robbie’ Robertson, put the bomber into a corkscrew before levelling out. It was then that the fighter struck. ‘The most startling thing about it was the noise. Normally you can hear nothing above the roar of the engines, not even flak unless splinters hit the aircraft, or bombs dropping. This then was a metallic, ripping, shattering, clicking sound repeated three or four times at split-second intervals. The nearest simile I can think of is the noise made by two billiard balls cracked together but magnified a thousand times and loud enough to make my head sing.’

  The din made him duck, a reflex that saved his life. He looked up to see ‘a foot wide hole in the instrument panel behind and above my head and another in the side of the nose, a few inches above my head as I’d crouched down.’

  The engines were still roaring but the nose was dropping and the aircraft seemed to be sliding down the sky. Willatt knelt on the step and peered into the pilot’s compartment. What he saw appalled him. ‘The seat was empty … this was shock enough in itself but then I could see a tangled mass of people lying in a static heap at the side of the pilot’s seat and inextricably entangled with the controls. They were all hit and probably dead.’ The pilot had been killed instantly by a cannon shell to the head. The flight engineer was mortally wounded. Willatt ‘tried to call up on the intercom – it was dead – and it was impossible to climb back over the bodies to speak to anyone.’ The aircraft was now well on fire with the port inner engine and wing ablaze and flames licking down the fuselage. He decided there was ‘no alternative but to go through the hole.’

  He clipped on his parachute, removed his helmet, pulled away the hatch and lowered himself into space, one hand clamped to his rip-cord handle. Almost immediately he felt ‘a sickening jerk on my groin as the chute opened. I don’t remember pulling the cord. I was practically unconscious from lack of oxygen … there was a horrible tearing, burning feeling between my legs where the harness pulled and my fur collar was clapped tightly over my face and ears. Both my boots were tugged off by the wind and my feet were freezing cold.’

  Even in this extreme of pain he noticed that ‘the target was still burning nicely, bombs thumping, flak cracking and searchlights waving about.’ He was suddenly aware of his immense good fortune. ‘What a good thing I wasn’t dangling in the air in the middle of it!’ As he drifted down the intricate parachute drill drummed into him during training kept running through his mind: ‘twist if necessary by crossing straps so as to face downwind with knees slightly bent but braced and arm across the face to protect it. Land lightly on the toes and bend the knees.’

  Nothing like this happened. The ground came up five minutes sooner than he expected and, with his legs held rigid, he landed with a thump on his heels. Despite following the escape procedure to the letter he was picked up a few hours later. He was lucky, as his captors let him know. He was led to the wreckage of his aircraft. One of the soldiers pointed to a ‘grim lump under a tarpaulin’ and pronounced the names of the dead men lying under it: ‘Robertson, Sh
adbolt, Hodder, Green.’ The rest had fallen elsewhere. Group Captain F. S. Hodder was the station commander at Syerston where the squadron was based. He rarely flew and had gone along for the trip to show solidarity with his men.

  Relief at having escaped from a doomed aircraft was quickly overtaken by anxiety of what would happen on the ground. Fear of the reception he would get was very much on Geoffrey Willatt’s mind when after his short spell of freedom he emerged from a haystack and came face to face with a farmer. ‘There were farm people dotted round the fields in all directions and I was definitely caught,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I don’t like men with pitchforks, even if they do look scared so I timidly said “RAF” and tried not to look like a Terror-Bomber.’ In fact he was treated with politeness by the soldier and policeman who arrested him. When he arrived at a Luftwaffe barracks ‘an officer in shiny boots and another in a monocle received me most courteously. I was parked on a bed … with some soup, potatoes, sauerkraut and a jug of coffee with sugar … some typists giggled and asked me if I was married …’36

  Such amiable treatment was by no means the rule. Passing through Aachen on his way to a PoW camp after being shot down over France, Flight Sergeant Gerry Hobbs of 617 Squadron found himself next to a troop train. The soldiers spotted him and he was ‘subjected to a lot of abuse and catcalls. I didn’t need to know German to understand their feelings and gestures as they were probably heading for the front.’ At Cologne, an elderly lady belaboured another British prisoner with an umbrella.37

  Some of the prisoners passing through a war-battered Germany on their way to captivity had known it in peacetime. Fate took Ken Goodchild back to Cologne, which he had visited as a schoolboy, after being shot down over Holland in May 1943. He arrived with four other prisoners by train from Brussels and was ‘taken off the train by four guards.’ When they asked why they needed so many ‘they said they had to protect us from the civilians, otherwise they’d lynch us.’