Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  Despite the enormous dangers and difficulties involved, Bomber Command entered the battle in an optimistic mood. Hamburg had impressed everybody. Even Harris’s critics in the Air Ministry gave their firm support. The mood was buoyed up by two other cheering developments. On 17 August the Americans carried out their first deep penetration operation in Germany. True to their doctrine of precision targeting they sent out 376 B-17 Flying Fortresses against ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt and the Messerschmitt works at Regensburg. They lost sixty aircraft but inflicted serious damage on both objectives. That evening Bomber Command carried out a precision raid of its own. Nearly 600 bombers set off in the moonlight to blast the German research and rocket production base at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. The operation set back the programme by several months.

  In this positive atmosphere the decision was taken to mount some preliminary raids before the main effort. The first phase opened with three attacks in late August and early September. The results were sobering. The bombs missed the city centre, little serious damage was done and losses were heavy. On the first raid, in which 727 aircraft took part, nearly 8 per cent of the heavy-bomber force was lost, the heaviest toll in one night so far in the war. Most of them were Halifaxes and Stirlings. On the third raid, only the better-performing Lancasters were sent. Even so, out of the 316 despatched, 22 were lost, a rate of 7 per cent.

  There was a respite until winter and darkness set in. Given the poor results of the initial attacks, Harris also wanted to wait until the new type of H2S onboard radar arrived. The battle proper began on the night of 18/19 November and was to continue until 31 March 1944. There were sixteen major attacks on Berlin, as well as an equal number of heavy raids on other German cities designed to unbalance the defences and keep the controllers uncertain as to the objective that night.

  The Battle of Berlin was the harshest test to which Bomber Command had yet been subjected. The target was far away and was reached by flying long hours through freezing and treacherous skies. Harris wrote afterwards that ‘the whole battle was fought in appalling weather and in conditions resembling those of no other campaign in the history of warfare. Scarcely a single crew caught a single glimpse of the objective they were attacking … thousands upon thousands of tons of bombs were aimed at the Pathfinders’ pyrotechnic skymarkers and fell through unbroken cloud which concealed everything below it except the confused glare of fires.’7

  The brevity of the tactical advantage bestowed by Window was apparent in the first few days of the campaign in the weight of losses sustained by the Stirlings and Halifaxes, now the most elderly machines in Bomber Command’s line-up. Stirlings were handicapped by their inability to reach the same altitude as the others and were forced to occupy the bottom layer of the bomber stream. This was the most vulnerable position and they suffered accordingly. Between August and the third week in November 109 Stirlings were destroyed, a loss rate of 6.4 per cent. At this point, the decision was taken to drop them from the front-line force. They never took part in operations in Germany again and their squadrons were given less dangerous work until they could be re-equipped with Lancasters.

  The Halifaxes moved into the hazardous spot vacated by the Stirlings and suffered an even worse fate. In the eleven weeks from mid-December 1943 to mid-February 1944 nearly 10 per cent of all Halifax sorties to Germany ended in disaster. In January 1944, the worst month of the battle, the Canadian 434 Squadron lost 24.2 per cent of the aircraft it sent to Berlin, 102 Squadron lost 18.7 per cent and 76 Squadron 16.7 per cent. These losses were unbearable and once again Harris was forced on to the defensive. After another painful night over Leipzig on 19/20 February he withdrew a further ten squadrons.

  The Battle of Berlin had a shape and chronology that made it easier to follow than Harris’s previous ‘battles’. In it, he pitted the aircraft available against what he took to be weakened German defenders in an effort to deal a crushing blow to the enemy’s heart. It was a battle of attrition that, as was clear long before the finish, would only end one way.

  Harris started out with 700 four-engined bombers, a larger force of heavy aircraft than he had yet had at his disposal. They were capable of carrying bomb loads of 1,500 tons on each raid, quantities that if the targets were correctly marked, would result in the systematic wrecking of the city, district by district. As always, there were grave problems in finding exactly where to drop the bombs. Berlin was 250 miles beyond the range of Oboe. It was up to those Pathfinder marker aircraft that were equipped with H2S to spot the target. Berlin’s vast spread made it difficult to pick out individual features on the blotchy picture painted by the electronic echo. The image was further confused by the lakes, canals and rivers of that watery city.

  The Battle of Berlin required new levels of fortitude and endurance from the Bomber Command crews. To sustain their morale they had to believe that they were making progress. Many of those taking part were new to the game. Reg Payne and his crew had arrived at Skellingthorpe to join 50 Squadron just after the battle began. Skipper Michael Beetham and the rest of the crew gathered for the main briefing on the afternoon of 22 November 1943. The last squadron raid had been against the railway line linking France to Italy at Modane, which was widely regarded as a ‘piece of cake’. Payne was hoping for a return trip, a nice gentle way of easing into ops. He was to be disappointed. When the CO strode in, ‘he drew the curtain straight back and said your target for tonight is Berlin … on the map there was this red line going up over the Baltic somewhere, towards Denmark and down … it was a bit of a shaker really … the crews were aghast. They all went “oooh.” They knew it was going to be an eight-hour trip.’8

  To add to their burden, Harris had ordered that each Lancaster should carry 2,000 pounds of extra bombs. Getting airborne with the standard load was nerve-racking enough. As freshmen, Beetham’s crew were spared the extra cargo.

  Sixteen of the squadron’s twenty-two crews were on that night. It was a big operation with 764 aircraft; 469 Lancasters, 234 Halifaxes, 50 Stirlings and 11 Mosquitoes. It was the largest force sent to Germany yet. Payne sat in his little wireless-operator’s den, curtained off from the rest of the crew. As they rumbled down to the runway he looked out at the port inner engine and felt nervous. He could see ‘the flames coming off the exhaust … after we were given the green light the pilot released the brakes and the engines went full bore so you thought they were almost out of control.’ The sight of the two-foot-long flames licking over the top of the wings caused him to remember that ‘there were two thousand gallons of petrol in those wings as well as the five tons of bombs on board.’ It only needed one engine to malfunction for the take-off to fail. On short runways the pilots would instruct the engineer to remove the gate on the throttle to push up the revs a dangerous little bit higher. The engines could only stand five minutes of it before they overheated and seized up. Sitting powerless at his little desk Payne felt ‘that the take-off was more frightening than anything else.’

  As a new crew, they were at the back of the bomber stream. The idea was that by the time they got to Berlin the target would be ablaze and easily recognizable. They circled Lincoln cathedral then headed north and east. Payne checked his onboard radar and picked up occasional test broadcasts from base. Close to Denmark they saw a few searchlights and some desultory flak rise from the shores of Sweden. As Germany approached, Payne started shoving bundles of Window, lying in the gangway next to him, up to the nose where the bomb-aimer pushed them through a chute.

  Nobody troubled them until they approached Berlin. The weather was terrible and many of the night-fighters were grounded. Then, ahead, he could see ‘the searchlights in the distance and the glow underneath the clouds. I realized that this was the real thing when the gunners said an aircraft had just been shot down behind us.’ Each sighting of a blazing bomber was noted by the navigator in his log to report to the intelligence officer when, or if, he returned.

  The mayhem was building outside but inside Beetham�
��s Lancaster there was a weird calm. ‘There was no real excitement at all,’ Payne remembered, ‘it was all very well controlled.’ Berlin was covered with cloud. They had been ordered to bomb on the green and red markers, which hung over the murk. The bomb-aimer, Les Bartlett, coaxed Beetham on to the right line. The bomb doors opened. Payne felt the blast of freezing air, a welcome antidote to the heat from the engines. Beneath his feet he could feel the grind and jangle of the shackle holding the cookie as the bomb left its moorings, and the aircraft leapt upwards. For a few more agonizing seconds the Lancaster ploughed on straight and level until the camera flash signalled the end of the immediate ordeal.

  They swung away and into the flak. Payne switched out his light and climbed into the astrodome. ‘It was about ten-tenths cloud and the searchlights never really got through. All they did was make the clouds glow. They showed the Lancasters up. You could see them going over the top of it like black fish … the flak was coming right through the clouds. You could smell it as well. Some of the fumes would get into the aircraft especially on the bomb run when the bomb doors were open.’

  On this, his first trip, he felt ‘excitement more than anything’. Casualties were light. Bad weather kept the night-fighters on the ground. Only twenty-six aircraft were lost, 3.4 per cent of the force. Despite the appalling visibility, the results were good. The devastation stretched from the centre west across the smart residential areas of Tiergarten and Charlottenburg and out to the suburb of Spandau. Several firestorms were ignited and a huge pillar of smoke towered nearly 19,000 feet the following day. About 2,000 died in the attack and 175,000 were bombed out of their homes. Thousands of soldiers were brought in to calm the chaos.

  On the afternoon after the raid, Marie ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov was leaving her office in the information department of the ministry of foreign affairs when the hall porter told her another air raid was imminent. She was twenty-six years old, an exiled Russian aristocrat who had been tossed by the fortunes of war into the cauldron of Berlin. There, she had made friends with a small, upper-class group of dedicated anti-Nazis. ‘I took to the stairs two at a time to warn those of my colleagues who lived far away to stay put as they might otherwise be caught in the open,’ she wrote in her diary. Just after she arrived at the flat where she lived with her father, the flak opened up. It was ‘immediately very violent.’ Her papa, who scraped a living teaching languages, ‘emerged with his pupils and we all hurried down to the half-basement behind the kitchen, where we usually sit out air raids. We had hardly got there when we heard the first approaching planes. They flew very low and the barking of the flak was suddenly drowned by a very different sound – that of exploding bombs, first far away and then closer and closer, until it semed as if they were falling literally on top of us. At every crash the house shook. The air pressure was dreadful and the noise deafening. For the first time I understood what the expression Bombenteppich [bomb carpet] means.’

  At one point there was a shower of broken glass and all three doors of the basement flew into the room, torn off their hinges. ‘We pressed them back into place and leant against them to try and keep them shut.’ Missie jumped to her feet at every crash. Her father, however, ‘imperturbable as always, remained seated … the crashes followed one another so closely and were so earsplitting that at the worst moments I stood behind him, holding on to his shoulders by way of self-protection. What a family bouillabaisse we would have made!’

  Before the all-clear sounded they were warned to get out of the house by a passing naval officer. The wind had risen and there was a danger of firestorms. They left the basement and ‘sure enough, the sky on three sides was blood-red.’9

  The fires passed the Vassiltchikovs by but the raid claimed the lives of 1,500 people that night. The attack was a new and appalling experience for Berliners. One of Missie’s colleagues in the foreign ministry, Hans-Georg von Studnitz, arrived with his wife in the city after a few days away with friends in Pomerania just after the raid finished. The population, he wrote in his diary, had ‘lived through an indescribable experience and survived what seemed like the end of the world.’

  Their train stopped in the suburbs. They set out to try and reach home by foot but were forced to give up. ‘The air was so polluted with the smell of burning and with the fumes of escaping gas, the darkness was so impenetrable and the torrents of rain so fierce that our strength began to fail us. Our progress was further barred by uprooted trees, broken telegraph poles, torn high-tension cables, craters, mounds of rubble and broken glass. All the time the wind kept on tearing window-frames, slates and gutters from the destroyed buildings and hurling them into the street.’

  And this was only on the outskirts. When, the following morning, they finally reached the city centre by underground and emerged at Alexanderplatz, the bombers had long gone but Berlin was still a ‘burning hell … all around the destroyed station in the Alexanderplatz the great warehouses were burning fiercely. Further towards the city stood the Royal Palace, the former residence of the Hohenzollerns, in the middle of a tornado of fire and smoke … we crossed the Spree into the burning banking quarter. The Zeughaus, the university, the Hedwigskirche and the National Library had all been reduced to ashes … the Tiergarten looked like some forest battle scene from the First World War.’10

  At the edge of the Tiergarten stood a huge flak tower and reinforced concrete shelter which could hold up to 18,000 people. Even those inside could feel the ferocity of the attack. The tower received a direct hit and, according to Konrad Warner, ‘the massive building was shaken to its foundations. The light went out and suddenly there was a deadly silence.’ When he finally emerged after the all-clear, his coat was set on fire by the blizzard of sparks.11

  The two consecutive attacks had created far less devastation than had been done to Hamburg. It was, however, to turn out to be the high point of the campaign. Bomber Command went back fourteen more times before the end of the Battle of Berlin but with nothing like the same success.

  The poor results came at a high price. On the last trip of the month, on 26/27 November, twenty-eight Lancasters were destroyed and fourteen more crashed on landing. On 2/3 December the German controllers identified Berlin as the target in sufficient time for the area to be swarming when the bomber stream arrived. This time, a total of forty bombers were lost.

  The American journalist Ed Murrow, famous for his broadcasts from Britain during the Blitz, accompanied 619 Squadron commander ‘Jock’ Abercromby on the trip. He described the experience in a powerful piece of reportage which went out on his This is London programme. It was an eventful night for Murrow who did not hide the intense fear he felt over the target. He told his audience that ‘the thirty miles to the bombing run was the longest flight I have ever made. Dead on time … the bomb-aimer reported “target indicators going down”. At the same moment the sky ahead was lit up by bright yellow flares. Off to starboard another kite went down in flames. The flares were sprouting all over the sky – reds and greens and yellows and we were flying straight for the fireworks.’ The bomber he was in, D-Dog, ‘seemed to be standing still, the four propellers thrashing the air but we didn’t seem to be closing in.’ Then, without warning ‘D-Dog was filled with an unhealthy white light. I was standing just behind Jock and could see the seams of the wings. His quiet Scots voice beat into my ears: “Steady lads, we’ve been coned.” His slender body lifted half out of the seat as he jammed the control column forwards and to the left. We were going down. Jock was wearing woollen gloves with the fingers cut off. I could see his fingernails turn white as he gripped the wheel. And then I was on my knees, flat on the deck, for he had whipped the Dog back into a slashing turn. The knees should have been strong enough to support me, but they weren’t, and the stomach seemed in some danger of letting me down too …’ As the bomber flipped over Murrow glimpsed what was happening on the ground. ‘The cookies … were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad … I looked down and the white fires had turned red;
they were beginning to merge and spread just like butter does on a hot plate.’

  Berlin, he said later, ‘was a kind of orchestrated hell – a terrible symphony of light and flame. It isn’t a pleasant form of warfare.’ The men he flew with spoke ‘of it as a job.’ Before he left Woodhall Spa he looked into the briefing room where ‘the tapes were stretched out on the big map all the way to Berlin and back again. A young pilot with old eyes said to me “I see we’re working again tonight.”’

  And so the labour went on, dangerous, dispiriting and without any obvious signs of progress. The authorities were eager to emphasize the importance of the work and the value of the sacrifices. The anonymous editor of the 115 Squadron news-sheet stressed that Berlin would be the target ‘until the place is wiped out. It is the HQ of nearly everything that matters in Germany – Armaments, Engineering, Foodstuffs, Administration. Berlin is the “London of Germany”. Until Berlin is Hamburged Jerry’s mainspring is wound up.’12 Freeman Dyson, a civilian scientist at Bomber Command headquarters, wrote afterwards that ‘the boys in the Lancasters were told that this Battle of Berlin was one of the decisive battles of the war and that they were winning it. I did not know how many of them believed what they were told. I knew only that what they were told was untrue.’ Dyson, who worked in the Operational Research Centre, had studied the bomb patterns from photographs which showed they were being scattered over an enormous area. It was true that Berlin contained a great variety of war industries and administrative centres. ‘But Bomber Command was not attempting to find and attack these objectives individually. We merely showered incendiary bombs over the city in as concentrated a fashion as possible, with a small fraction of high-explosive bombs to discourage the fire-fighters. Against blanket attacks the defence could afford to be selective, with fire-fighters giving priority to dousing fires in factories and leaving houses to burn.’ He concluded that with bomber losses rising sharply there was ‘no chance that continuing the offensive in such a style could have any decisive effect on the war.’13