Dyson’s prescriptions were unrealistic. Everyone wanted precision. But the technology could not deliver it. The Harris approach relied on weight of numbers. But as the battle progressed it was clear those numbers were dwindling alarmingly. On the thirteenth trip, during the night of 28/29 January 1944, forty-six aircraft were lost, 6.8 per cent of the force of 677 aircraft that had been sent out. On 30/31 January Harris launched his last attempt on Berlin. The German controllers failed to intercept the stream on the way in but the fighters eventually caught up, hounding the bombers throughout the return flight. One Halifax and thirty-two Lancasters were shot down.
Bomber Command was bleeding, but there was little to show for its sacrifices. It was inflicting pain on Berlin, but with nothing like the intensity needed to produce any serious collapse of morale. Many of the bombs were wasted. The sprawling city could soak up a huge amount of violence. Reports showed that for all the damage done to the built-up areas and though the centre of Berlin was effectively flattened, many of the bombs so painfully and expensively delivered were falling into open country.
The level of dread felt by the crews when they heard they were going to Berlin mounted. Michael Beetham’s crew found themselves back in the Big City the night following their debut. On their return they found that their Lancaster’s flaps were not working and were forced to divert to the emergency landing strip at Wittering. Two nights later they were ordered to Berlin again. On the way back they were told Skellingthorpe was fogged in and they were to land at Pocklington. That too was covered in low cloud so they switched to its satellite, Melbourne. At least three aircraft were lost trying to land there that morning. One ran out of fuel and crashed into a farmhouse, killing five of the crew and a widow and a forty-year-old female lodger who were living there. Another ran off the runway and got bogged down, to be hit by another bomber as it landed. All survived. Beetham got his team down but as they were being driven by a WAAF back to the base they heard over her radio two crews who were trying to land being told to head their aircraft out to sea and bale out.
The odds against the crew surviving seemed infinitesimal. ‘We were beginning to think that’s only four operations and we’ve got thirty to do,’ Reg Payne, the wireless operator, remembered. So it continued. On 3 December on a trip to Leipzig they were badly shot up by a Ju 88. On 29 December, on their way yet again to Berlin, a thirty-pound incendiary bomb dropped from an aircraft above crashed through their wing. Luckily the fuel tank was already empty.14
Yet even these experiences did not match the night of 30/31 March 1944. The target was Nuremberg, one of the alternative destinations chosen to keep the German controllers wondering whether or not Berlin was the target. Bright moonlight was forecast. Such conditions offered great advantages to the defender and it was expected that the operation would be cancelled. But a weather update predicting high cloud along the route and clear conditions over the target persuaded Harris to press ahead. There was further confusion when a Mosquito from the Met Flight returned from a reconnaissance trip to report that the reverse was likely. There would be no sheltering cloud on the way, but plenty over Nuremberg itself. Despite this up-to-date intelligence the order to stand down never came, and 795 aircraft were dispatched. The Germans were not fooled by diversionary raids and fighters were waiting along the route, picking up the stream as it reached the Belgian border. They followed it through the moonlight all the way to Nuremberg and back again. Altogether ninety-five bombers were lost, nearly 12 per cent of the force. Hardly any damage was done to the city. The wind forecast was wrong and upset navigational calculations so that 120 bombers attacked Schweinfurt, fifty miles to the north-west of the intended target, though again to little effect.
Looking out of the astrodome, Reg Payne could see ‘aircraft being shot down all around us … we could even see the aircraft registration letters it was so clear.’ They were painfully aware they were leaving condensation trails in the clear night sky and dived to lose them but it was no good. ‘The fighters had a field day.’
The Nuremberg catastrophe was the last disaster in a losing battle. The losses could not continue. Nuremberg marked the end of the Battle of Berlin. Harris maintained to the last that if the Americans had joined in, his claim that the war could be finished by bombing alone would have been vindicated. But it was clear even to him that to continue under the prevailing conditions would mean disaster. The night-fighters controlled the sky. Between November 1943 and March 1944 1,047 British bombers were destroyed. During that period the number of aircraft available for operations varied from about 800 to just below 1,000. That meant that the German air defences disposed of the entire bomber strength available at the start of the battle. The bombers, which never had the ability to defend themselves, were losing even the capacity to evade. In the words of Noble Frankland, ‘the tactical conditions of daylight had invaded the night.’15
Harris admitted defeat in early April. The battle had cost twice the number of aircraft he had told Churchill it might be necessary to lose as the acceptable price of victory. The sacrifice had not ‘cost Germany the war’. He laid out the harsh lesson he had learned in a letter to the Air Staff. He wrote: ‘the cost of attacking targets in Berlin under weather conditions which gave good prospects of accurate and concentrated bombing is too high to be incurred with any frequency.’
Belatedly, he turned his attention to some of the technical faults that had contributed to the heavy losses. The bombers’ chances would improve, he said, if the gunners were better armed. He also pointed out that visibility from the turrets was abysmal. Even if improvements were made overnight this was unlikely to redress the imbalance significantly. It would have to wait for the advent of the protection that long-range fighter escorts could provide before the mortal threat of the Luftwaffe’s night-fighters receded.
Long before Harris’s change of heart, some of the crews had started to lose faith. This was reflected in the increased rate of ‘early returns’ when aircraft turned back because of real or imagined technical difficulties. Out of sixty-six sorties flown by 115 Squadron in the first three weeks of December, eleven crews turned back without reaching the target area. This compared with the figures for May during the Battle of the Ruhr, when there were only two aborted missions. The tendency was particularly marked in squadrons equipped with Halifaxes which had shown themselves to be specially vulnerable to night-fighters. The decision to load yet more bombs on the Lancasters, slowing them down and making them less manoeuvrable, thereby depriving their pilots of their main defensive advantage, also produced displays of indiscipline. Some captains took to dropping part of their bomb load in the North Sea on the way out to give themselves a better chance of evasion. The lengthening tail of the creepback over the bombing area was another sign that nerves were fraying.
But the great majority of the crews never wavered and persisted with their duty, even though there was little sign that their efforts were worth it. There were, however, limits to courage, as the men leading the campaign were obliged to remember.
12
The Chop
Fear of the chop loomed over everyone. Even the outwardly nerveless like the Australian Dambuster veteran Dave Shannon felt its shadow. He and Leonard Cheshire were about to board their aircraft one evening, Germany-bound, when Cheshire remarked on the wonderful sunset. ‘I don’t give a fuck about that,’ said Shannon. ‘I want to see the sunrise.’ The great question was the extent to which that dread could be controlled. Bomber crews had an intimate relationship with death, which stalked their careers from the first months of training. Non-combat crashes accounted for 15 per cent of overall fatalities. The pointlessness of these losses made them stick in the mind. Reg Payne remembered how, having survived the worst of the Battle of Berlin, he was sent on a fighter affiliation exercise over Yorkshire. A Canadian pilot was flying alongside his skipper, Michael Beetham, and two extra gunners joined the crew. When the fighter made its mock attack the Canadian put the bomber into a screaming co
rkscrew. As they dived at 300 mph the port outer engine caught fire. Beetham ordered the crew to jump.
There were ten men aboard. Beetham, the Canadian and the navigator slipped easily through the front hatch. At the back of the aircraft, though, there was chaos. Payne struggled rearwards from his wireless operator’s desk to find five men huddled around the side exit. The bomb-aimer had already jumped but the others clung to the fuselage, each urging the other to go first. Don, the flight engineer, was already doomed. As it was only a training exercise he had not bothered to bring his parachute. The others were paralysed with fear. Their last position had been over the Humber estuary. It was February. Spread below them was a thick, grey blanket of cloud with no way of knowing if sea or land lay underneath. Finally Jock Higgins, the mid-upper gunner, lunged for the door ‘but instead of going out like you should do rolling up in a ball with your back to the slipstream so as to miss the tail, he stepped out and hit it.’ For a moment it seemed that the tailplane would slice him in half then his parachute opened and ‘flipped him off as quick as lightning like flicking a fly.’
Payne went next. As he plunged through the cloud he tugged frantically at his rip-cord with no result, before realizing that he was pulling the wrong handle. He looked up to see one of the stricken bomber’s blazing wings ‘coming down like a leaf’. Fred Ball the rear gunner, with whom Payne had endured so much, and the two extra gunners, ‘didn’t get out … they just didn’t [manage] to do it.’1
Crashes such as this were especially bruising to morale. Lives had been spent for nothing. The mortality rate at OTUs, which were often equipped with clapped-out and underserviced aircraft, was particularly high. In the six months Doug Mourton spent as an instructor at Wellesbourne, fifteen aircraft and crews were lost. ‘An OTU should be a safe enough place,’ he wrote, ‘but actually we were flying with dodgy crews in dodgy aircraft … Wellington 1Cs which were very old and obscure.’2
Training accidents often provided the crews with their first sight of a dead body. Corpses were curiously absent from the war the crews were waging. Guy Gibson’s nerves were rattled by the sight of a Wellington which crashed-landed one snowy night and burst into flames. The following morning Gibson and his friend Dave Humphries went to look at the wreckage. ‘As we got closer we could smell that unpleasant smell of burnt aircraft, but when we got really close we could see quite clearly the pilot sitting still at his controls, burnt to a frazzle, with his goggles gently swaying in the wind hanging from one hand. Without a word we began to retreat and were back in our operations hut within a few minutes.’3
In the air, death was often instantaneous. A cannon shell or a lump of molten flak would hit the bomb bay and the aircraft and those inside it were blown to pieces. There were also times when individual members were killed in a fighter or flak attack while others survived. The swing of the scythe was impressively arbitrary.
Reg Fayers described in a frank letter to his wife the death of a young sergeant pilot called Wittlesea, ‘a nice kid with bags of enthusiasm,’ who was flying second dickey. They were on their way back from Nuremberg. Fayers was visiting the Elsan toilet when they ran into flak. H-Honkytonk ‘was thrown around the sky and me with it, until Steve got her out of this nasty stuff which had been our worst yet.’ A large chunk of shrapnel hit the port outer engine which promptly caught fire. ‘At the same minute, Witt said: “I think I’ve been hit, skip. I think I’m going to pass out.” … By the time we were out of the flak, Lew found Witt to be unconscious – no more than five minutes at most. It took several more minutes for Lew and Phil to get Witt back to the rest position and find the wound and treat him. Anyway I think Witt was already dead. He died very soon anyway, and there was so much blood about he must have died from the loss of it, and the shock of course.’
The crew were too preoccupied with nursing the damaged aircraft home through an area thick with night-fighters to brood much on the death. Fayers recorded his surprise when informed that Witt was dead: ‘I wrote in the log “second dickey died.” It was nothing more than that.’ They eventually landed safely at Ford, an emergency aerodrome on the Sussex coast. The following day they went to examine ‘Honkytonk’ and discovered that ‘the piece of flak fragment that killed poor old Witt was no more than an inch and a half across. It came thru the nose of the kite by Tom’s right hip, up thru two pieces of metal, right thru my seat – upon which I was not sitting by the grace of god.’ Fayers’ trip to the Elsan had probably saved his life. Wittlesea had been correspondingly unlucky. The shrapnel had hit an important artery in his thigh and he bled to death. As Fayers reflected, ‘I don’t think there’s more than a breath of wind or a feather’s weight between life and death.’4
The spirit of death was everywhere. The crews accorded it an awed, mediaeval respect. To them, death was The Reaper and they sensed when one of their number had been brushed by his bony fingers. Brian Frow’s writings do not show him to be a fanciful man but he recorded how, when waiting on long winter nights in the ante-room for ops to begin, he came to recognize ‘the chop look’.
It was a very real feature and whether it was true or not we believed it. Some aircrew would spend time playing snooker, cards or reading. A few just sat and pretended to doze; but sometimes their faces lost colour and they would nervously flex their muscles. If approached they would talk in raised voices and they invariably missed the ‘aircrew supper’ of eggs, bacon and beans. They could be seen visiting the [lavatories] too often and a few would sit outside the telephone call box trying to get through to their friends or relations, but forgetting that all ‘off station’ calls were banned during alerts, and that the phones were cut off. These were some of the symptoms of the ‘chop look’. We believed that anyone who had it was aware that he was near to death; he seemed to have been informed by some extraterrestrial power, be it God or intuition.
Frow noticed it in his friend ‘Shack’ Shackleton, who like him was nineteen years old. ‘He had gone through training with aplomb and was a popular and lively figure. One night … we had received a postponement of take-off and were sitting around in the mess, waiting. I saw to my horror that Shack had the dreaded symptoms, but I was unable to comfort him. By now we had completed four successful operations without serious incidents so Shack had no specific reason to be suffering from nerves.’ At eight o’clock operations were scrubbed and Frow and his friend relaxed. Two days later Shackleton was assigned to an attack on the Scharnhorst in Brest docks and failed to return.5
Everyone had a similar story. Don Charlwood remembered ‘a particularly coarse but good-natured Australian’ known to everyone as ‘Bull’ approaching him as he prepared to set off for Turin. A trip to Italy was generally regarded as a ‘piece of cake’ given the anti-air gunners’ reluctance to stay at their posts during raids. Crews marked each mission over Germany or France by painting a bomb on the nose of their aircraft. Italy merited only an ice-cream cone.
‘Listen son [Bull said], you’re not going tonight. If anything happens to me, could you get my personal belongings home to my mother?’
I looked with astonishment at his ruddy face, taken unawares by the sudden change in him.
‘I suppose the Air Force would do it, but you know the way it is.’
I stammered, ‘They say the target’s easy –’
‘I know all about that son, but I’ve got an idea. Anyway, you’d do that for me?’
‘Of course.’
But that Turin could claim ‘Bull’ I refused to believe.
Charlwood woke the next day to see a van removing ‘Bull’s’ belongings from the hut opposite.6
Not all premonitions turned out to be accurate. Cy March remembered how ‘before going on a particular operation, I felt all day long that this was to be my last trip. All aircrew have had that feeling I suppose. We turned on to the runway for take-off and there, in a field was a dead tree, with a dirty great black crow sitting on one of its branches, just like a horror film. My blood turned to ice. We got the �
��green” and off we went. It was one of the easiest ops we ever did.’7
The knowledge of your own fragile mortality was all-pervading. Edwin Thomas displayed a touching emotional reticence in the many letters he wrote to his mother throughout his brief RAF career. He was anxious not to upset her by revealing the dangers of his job but occasionally even he could not keep death out of the picture. ‘My dear mother,’ he wrote on 24 September 1942 from RAF Harwell. ‘I have arrived safely at this huge camp and am settling down in the sergeants’ mess … when I first arrived in the dormitory I pointed to an empty bed and said “is this anyone’s?” “No,” came the answer. “He’s missing.”’ Three weeks later he described running into a friend whom he had met during training. ‘He and I shared a room and it is very interesting to hear news of the boys I knew – most of whom appear to have gone for a burton.’ Just before Christmas he asked if she remembered him mentioning ‘my old friend Wee Baxter from Blackpool. He was killed in a night crash last Tuesday, poor old chap. Only last week we were talking about prangs and he said “I shall be all right, I have a good pilot.” They say that only the good die young …’
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 78