Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  After the war it was reckoned that possibly 350 Allied airmen who survived being shot down were subsequently murdered by Germans on the ground.38 Civilians who took part likely knew that they had nothing to fear from the authorities. Official policy was to allow them to have their way. In August 1943, Heinrich Himmler had declared that it was ‘not the business of the police to get mixed up in altercations between the population and “terror fliers”’ who had baled out. As the war progressed and the bombing worsened officials seemed to positively encourage lynchings. In February 1945, Gauleiter Hoffman of South Westphalia directed that surviving aircrew were ‘not to be spared from the outrage of the public. I expect the police to demonstrate that they are not the protectors of these gangsters and anyone who ignores this order will have to answer to me.’ Indeed, helping survivors was a crime, and several kind-hearted souls suffered for doing so. In the autumn of 1943, two men from Dorsten in the Ruhr were sent to a labour camp for giving coffee and bread to two Allied airmen.

  After the war, though, the perpetrators of lynchings sometimes had to face the victors’ justice. In one case, six men were put in front of a military court on charges of the ill-treatment and killing of an unknown British sergeant pilot who baled out with his crew during a raid on Bochum, in the Ruhr, on 24 March 1945. He landed in a field watched by a crowd who rushed towards him. The airman was wounded and feebly raised his arms to surrender. Franz Brening, who later served as a prosecution witness, tried to help him by removing his parachute and laying him on the ground. The mob were having none of it and began punching and kicking the victim. One of them, Stefan Weiss, seized a rifle from a German soldier standing passively by and tried to shoot the airman but the gun jammed. Another, Friedrich Fischer, sent a young boy off to fetch a hammer. He then, according to the court records, ‘struck the airman a violent blow on the back of his head resulting in the breaking of his skull.’ Fischer was heard afterwards ‘to boast of what he had done.’

  Fischer was sentenced to death. He admitted the crime but blamed ‘incitement by the mass’ in his appeal. He also asked the court to bear in mind the suffering he had endured as a result of Allied bombing. Weiss cited ‘Goebbels propaganda’ and ‘daily bomber attacks.’ Neither was successful as a defence. Fischer was hanged. Weiss was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment but was released after six.39

  Ken Goodchild and his comrades made it safely into captivity. Their experience, though, had demonstrated the folly of imagining that the danger in the air diminished the nearer you got to home. They had just been starting to believe they might make it back alive when night-fighters attacked over Holland. It was the end of a nightmarish trip. A flak shell had ripped through their Halifax ten minutes from the target but miraculously failed to explode. A second burst blew off the front turret flooding the aircraft with freezing air and wounding the navigator. Showing amazing resolution they carried on, completed the bombing run and headed homewards.

  Without a functioning navigator they were unable to judge the correct course and wandered away from the comfort of the returning bomber stream. They were easy meat for the Junkers 88 and Focke-Wulf 190 which swooped just as the coastline came into view. The starboard wing was soon ablaze and dripping great gouts of flaming petrol from the tanks. The nose went down into a shallow dive and no amount of wrestling with the controls could pull it up. Goodchild

  went to the centre of the aircraft and discovered that the whole middle part of the aeroplane was one ball of flame so there was nothing we could do to get out of the back. The skipper gave the order to abandon the aircraft so the engineer and myself got hold of the wounded navigator and brought him forward to the front escape hatch [and] opened it. There was a safety device there which if you had a wounded member of crew who couldn’t operate his parachute then you attached the line to his ripcord, threw him out and that line pulled the ripcord for him. At the same time the bombardier went immediately after him so that he would land somewhere close by and be able to render assistance. The engineer was the next to go and he sat on the edge of the escape hatch. I went back into my cabin to blow up all the radio equipment, destroy all the code lists and [when I came] back the engineer was still sitting there so I booted him in the backside and out he went. I later discovered that the reason he hadn’t gone earlier was simply because he was tied to the aeroplane by his oxygen pipe and by his intercom wire. It all got caught up and when he actually jumped I nearly throttled him.40

  All the crew, including the wounded navigator Chic Henderson, survived the jump.

  Once over the North Sea it felt like the worst was over. To glimpse the lightening sky at the end of a long, rough trip was like slowly waking up from a nightmare. Returning from a raid on Koblenz during which they had survived an attack by night-fighters Harry Yates was finally given the course for Mepal, the crew’s home station. ‘That precipitated a gradual change of mood. We descended through light cloud and levelled at 6,000 feet. Visibility was good. Moonlight played on the English Channel. We began to feel more relaxed. No, we began to feel good. This had been another demanding raid, a night of the hunter. But we had not been snared …’41

  Jack Currie knew he was not supposed to smoke but ‘on the long ride home over the North Sea the temptation was usually too strong for me.’ When they had descended below 10,000 feet and oxygen masks were no longer needed he would ‘loosen my straps, engage the automatic pilot, sit back and really enjoy that cigarette. At those moments, cruising home on half-power with the darkness, while the dawn began to touch the sky behind my left shoulder with a few bright strokes of gold, the crew cocooned in warm leather and fur, lulled by the gently throbbing metal, the terrors of the night would soon disperse.’42 In some crews, the wireless operator ignored regulations and tuned the radio to a music station.

  There was one more peril to be overcome before the wheels kissed the tarmac. Getting down was harder than getting up. Pilots had to wait for a landing order before they could touch down and the weight of numbers meant that they were sometimes forced to fly circuits until their turn came. Landing and take-off are the most dangerous times in flying. The returning aircraft were often shot up, their controls and surfaces battered by flak and shell and their skippers numb with exhaustion. Severely damaged aircraft were diverted to emergency airfields in Kent, Suffolk and Yorkshire with extended and broadened runways.

  The operation ended where it had begun, in the briefing room. Intelligence officers doggedly probed the exhausted survivors of the night about what they had done and what they had seen, eager for any detail that could build their picture of the strength and disposition of the defences. Then, weary and subdued, the crews left to hand in their parachutes, drink a cup of tea and eat a plate of bacon and eggs before crashing into bed, trying to push from their minds the thought that the following night they might have to do it all over again.

  10

  ‘A Select Gang of Blokes’

  Even by the standards of wartime, when sacrifice becomes the norm, the bombing campaign required extraordinary commitment to sustain it. The motivations that drove bomber crews were complicated but there were certain shared attitudes that bound them together. The most essential was the mixture of devotion, affection and trust that crew members felt for each other.

  Serving in a bomber was an intimate experience. As Doug Mourton pointed out, when flying ‘each one was directly or indirectly dependent on the other for his survival. There was mutual trust and reliance. This promoted fondness, affection and respect.’ Mourton found that ‘friendships thus forged, had a depth and unique quality that never existed with friendships before, and for me never after.’ There was also a deep personal relationship between aircrew and ground crews. They were ‘as one, winning and losing together’.1

  Bomber Command was staffed with men who in peacetime would have been unlikely to choose a service career, and had no strong feelings of institutional loyalty to the air force. Reg Fayers, a fastidious man who was repelled by the rough
side of service life, admitted that after two and a half years in uniform ‘on the whole I’ve disliked the RAF. I doubt I could name six things I’ve positively liked.’ Top of the list were his crew, ‘a select gang of blokes, Ken Porter, Joe, Tony, Mac, Ken Brewster, Red and Lofty, than whom I’ll never meet better. For those, I wouldn’t have missed it.’2

  The crewing-up technique recognized brilliantly the importance of human chemistry. Crews got together because, instinctively, they felt each other to be competent or lucky. But there was also an element of subliminal mutual attraction. Despite the almost invariable disparities in background and geography, crews tended to like each other. Going to war in a big aeroplane required intense interdependency. Men who functioned competently together in desperate circumstances formed strong bonds of liking and respect. The crew took the place of the family, a little universe whose dynamics were more important and absorbing than those of the world outside. Bomber squadrons were large, with up to 200 operational airmen backed up by hundreds more ground staff, and therefore rather impersonal. The sense of unit identity was much less pronounced than it was in Fighter Command. Its members tended to come together only at briefings and debriefings. Len Sumpter, the guardsman turned 57 Squadron bomb-aimer, found ‘you didn’t get friendly with other crews. You said “good morning” to them and this and that. But you never really got intimate with them … you were your own little band of seven and that was it.’

  Sumpter’s crew was a typical mix of class and nationality. His pilot was an Australian, David Shannon, who was only twenty years old and looked it yet was already recognized as a superb pilot. The navigator was a Canadian, Danny Walker, the quietest member of the crew. They nicknamed the skinny wireless operator Brian Goodale ‘Concave’ because when he was working ‘he was always bending forward … his head was forward and his feet were forward and his bottom was sticking out.’ Jack Buckley, the rear gunner, liked a drink and drove racing cars. Bob Henderson, the flight engineer, was a ‘tall, staid Scotsman’ who only occasionally joined his comrades on their sprees in Lincoln. The front gunner was Brian Jagger whose grandfather had been a portait-painter who had royalty among his clients. All flew with 617 in the Dams Raid of May 1943.

  They ‘all got on very well together … and I think that applied throughout the whole squadron. All the crews were the same I think which was caused by being thrown together so much. You just had to get on with people. You couldn’t afford to be indifferent.’3

  Loyalty to your crew could create conflicts of emotional interest. Cy March should have felt pleased when he was granted fourteen days’ sick leave after breaking his finger. It would mean a delirious fortnight with his wife Ellen, whom he had only just married. ‘I knew I should have been over the moon but I wasn’t, for we knew we were to be posted to 467 RAAF Squadron very shortly.’ He went off to the canteen where he knew the ‘boys’ would be. They congratulated him on his good luck. But March told them miserably: ‘I’m worried I’ll lose you rotten lot if I go.’ The skipper, Neville ‘Bug’ Emery told him: ‘Go home, enjoy yourself, give Ellen our love and don’t worry. We will wait for you; we aren’t going to break a new bod in.’4

  The break-up of a happy crew felt as traumatic as the sundering of a happy family. Ken Newman was dismayed to be told that, for reasons that were never explained, his crew were to be split up after only a few operations together. He was ‘shocked and upset by this disclosure’. When he complained to a senior officer ‘he dismissed my protests out of hand … with tears in my eyes I went outside his office and told the other members of my crew who were waiting there.’ They were equally unhappy and demanded an immediate interview with the officer. ‘This was granted and they all pleaded with him to be allowed to stay together with me as their pilot. He was unmoved and just snapped at them too that a decision had been made and would not be reversed whatever they said.’

  Such insensitivity appears to have been rare. Newman learned later that the orders came from his former squadron commander with whom he had fallen out, though ‘for what reason we deserved this form of punishment I could not … imagine.’ The good companions were packed off to other squadrons as ‘spares’. The parting was painful. ‘I was losing great friends … who I had lived with, flown with on training and on operations and had trusted implicitly for the previous nine months.’ Newman set off for his new posting ‘with a heavy heart and feeling utterly miserable and lonely’.5

  Of course not all crews were as harmonious. Willie Lewis arrived at his squadron in April 1943 pleased that after all his long training as a flight engineer he was about to put his hard work to use. ‘The future held no frightening menace, only the justification for everything which had taken place till then. The sun could not have shone more brightly that day nor the birds in the hedgerow have sung more sweetly.’ His captain was John Maze, at twenty the youngest of the crew. ‘The skipper and I immediately made friends. I had left school at fourteen. The skipper went to university. But on the squadron I was never made to feel inferior for a moment.’ He was less enthusiastic about two other crew members. Ron, the mid-upper gunner, was an ex-car salesman who had already done a tour in the Middle East and been commissioned as a pilot officer. Lewis resented his haughty manner. ‘He wore his uniform with dignity and enjoyed being an officer. He mixed little with the crew and they had the unpleasant feeling that he was trying to patronize them.’

  Joe, the bomb-aimer, was thirty-six, by far the oldest in the crew. Before the war he had been a policeman in South London, ‘running in bookmakers’ touts and prostitutes’. He ‘regarded all the members of the crew with good-natured contempt. The skipper because he was a boy of twenty who had a cultured voice, a father who was an artist and had been to a university. Dave [the navigator] because he “was only an errand boy” – he had served in a shop in civilian life. Jock [the wireless operator] went about with Dave so he was just as useless.’ He despised ‘Rammy’ the garrulous Yorkshire-born rear gunner ‘because, well, he was just Rammy’.

  Joe had done some flying and navigation training and was free with his advice to both pilot and navigator. Maze, despite his youth had the authority to keep him in his place. But for all Joe’s irritating ways, Willie and the rest of the crew felt there was something comforting about him. He had a self-assurance ‘which made him good to fly with. Looking at him the crew felt that they were safe, for anybody who loved himself so wholeheartedly must survive and surely could not come to any harm.’ Their hunch turned out to be justified. Later on when they were faced with emergencies he was ‘to prove as capable and resourceful as he was exasperating’.6

  The crucial element in crew cohesion was confidence. If one member lost the trust of his fellows, everyone’s morale withered. The system recognized this and in special circumstances agreed to the removal of the weak link. Bill Farquharson lost a propeller in mid-flight when piloting a Wellington during training. The crew were forced to bale out and he crashlanded. Bad luck pursued him to his squadron, 115, where ‘we had the odd mishap, engine failures and hydraulics failures.’ Farquharson’s crew were all sergeants. He was an officer. In the sergeants’ mess they came across a pilot whose crew had been borrowed by the wing commander. ‘They chummed up with him and decided that they would like to fly with him. They came to me and that was that. They put it very nicely. It wasn’t that they thought I was a poor pilot or anything like that. They reckoned I was a pretty good pilot to have got them out of [difficult] situations. But they thought I was an unlucky one … that happened to lots of chaps.’

  When the situation was explained to the squadron commander, Wing Commander A. G. S. ‘Pluto’ Cousens, he agreed that Farquharson would have to find another crew. ‘I was very disappointed indeed [but] Cousens spoke to me and said these things happen, and perhaps for the best, because if the crew is a little dithery it spreads. Perhaps they want to argue with you – “shouldn’t you do it this way or that way.” And you’ve no time for arguments. You’ve got to act.’7


  If the crew was like a family then the aeroplane was the family home. They were given pet names and there was consternation if the personal ‘kite’ was unavailable. ‘If you had any faults on the plane of course you had to wait until they were fixed, or borrow another one,’ said Len Sumpter. ‘And we didn’t like borrowing planes because you got used to your own plane. It was like when you … walk into your own house. If you go into another house, a stranger’s house, you’ve got the feeling that you’re not right. But you could always tell when you were in your own plane. I don’t know why I’m sure. Whether it was the sound of it, the smell of it or what.’8

  There was also luck to consider. Don Charlwood always felt happiest in B-Beer, even when it was playing up. During a raid on Essen in January 1943 there was trouble with the port outer engine. The following day the crew was ordered back to Essen again. They learned that though B-Beer had been repaired they were flying in L-London. B-Beer had been given to Sergeant B. E. Atwood, a Canadian pilot who had been attached to the squadron for one night. This, as far as the crew was concerned, was unacceptable and the skipper, Geoff Maddern, went to protest to the CO. ‘The Wingco,’ Charlwood believed, ‘had intended giving us the better of the two aircraft but to us, L-London was unthinkable.’ They had endured two bad experiences in aircraft code-named L. It was an unlucky letter. The CO granted their request. Atwood got L-London and they flew in B-Beer. But that night the port outer engine failed again, catching fire just after take-off. They dropped their bombs into the North Sea and headed back to Elsham. On landing, Charlwood went to see his girlfriend. When he returned to the crew room he found Geoff ‘sitting moodily by the fire’ talking to the flight engineer, Doug Richards. ‘As I came in he glanced up. “Atwood has gone. [he said] L failed to return.”