Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  It was not long before he joined their number. He arrived finally at 78 Squadron at Linton-on-Ouse at the end of March 1943, two and a half years after joining up. At last all his training was going to be put to use. ‘Our crew are to do our first op tonight,’ he wrote. ‘Do not worry because this squadron has a fine reputation and loses few kites. We have been waiting the last few days for this job and all feel very bucked and excited (note the steady hand).’ This was one of the last raids of Bomber Command’s spring diversion to the Atlantic ports and it went off smoothly. ‘The whole business was little different from an ordinary cross-country night flight … we arrived there nine minutes ahead of the bombing time so we had to circle it until we could bomb. The flak was said to have been light by the veterans but there was sufficient to keep us weaving and turning.’

  Thomas knew very well that a trip to France was not the same as a trip to the Ruhr. Nonetheless, it was an enormous relief to have finally been tested in battle, no matter how gently, and his letter to his mother of 8 April was cautious but optimistic, talking about a possible twelve days’ leave in four or five weeks’ time. ‘This will suit our purpose admirably because Pat, the rear gunner, will be twenty-one in May and is going to have a GRAND PARTY. I have never in all my two-and-a-half years in the RAF had so much time to spare. I inspect the wireless equipment of our kite in the morning and sign as having done so and if no ops, I buzz off to York in the afternoon with the crew.’

  Thomas loved dancing and claimed to have worn out his shoes in the dance-halls of York. He asked his mother to send a pair from home, ‘as soon, soon, soon as you can. I don’t want to be deprived of my favourite enjoyment. I will reward your kindness by saving some more sweets and a tin of orange juice.’ It was his last letter. Thomas’s Halifax, K-Kathleen, disappeared on the night of 16/17 April while attacking the Skoda works at Pilsen.8

  Empty beds had the same gloomy effect as the empty chairs at breakfast in the messes of the Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front. The RAF’s administrators were keen to remove evidence of losses as quickly as possible. Sergeants were issued with a haversack to carry their wash kit which hung on numbered hooks at the mess. Reg Payne remembered how ‘they would put up a notice in the mess saying will all members remove their [haversacks] from the pegs from 11 o’clock until 1 o’clock.’ He passed by the mess just after the deadline had expired to see ‘them throwing all the ones that were left into a wheelbarrow. They [belonged to] the ones who’d gone missing.’9

  The loss of friends was confirmed by the doleful letters FTR – Failed To Return – chalked up on the crew blackboard. The rules of survival meant that grief had to be curtailed. ‘The first time I lost a good pal, one I’d trained with, I felt very, very sad,’ Roy MacDonald remembered. ‘I went out into York determined to get absolutely blotto. I can’t remember how much I drank but I remained horribly, stone-cold sober. But after that you just said, “well that’s tough,” and forgot them.’10

  Surviving meant overcoming odds that, it was all too apparent, were stacked toweringly against you. From the beginning it was clear that the crews would have to be given some hope that they were, nonetheless, beatable. The Air Ministry worked on devising a limit on the amount a crew would have to fly before being switched to non-operational duties. Initially the line was drawn at 200 hours, which, it was thought, would allow a 50–50 chance of survival. There was an obvious objection to this yardstick. Because of the difference in flying speeds, those manning twin-engined bombers would only have to do thirty trips to reach the limit whereas those in the heavies would have to do forty. In August 1942 Harris’s office made an interim ruling that crews would have to complete thirty operations before they were ‘tour expired’ and eligible to move on to a six-month stint instructing at a training school. This became official policy on 1 May 1943. Anyone who completed a first tour was not expected to do more than twenty on a second. Pathfinder Force crews were set a single continuous tour of forty-five sorties.11

  It was the squadron commander who decided what constituted a completed sortie. Their interpretation of the rules could vary from a degree of sympathy that in some eyes approached laxity to a rigidity that bordered on the inhumane. By the middle of the war most COs were veterans who had completed a tour themselves and their attitudes were conditioned by their own reactions and behaviour. The keenest commanders were likely to regard any failure as an indication of slackness or loss of nerve.

  Early returns, ‘boomerangs’ in RAF parlance, when a crew turned back because of a fault in the aircraft, were rigorously investigated. Pilots who had experienced genuine mechanical failures prayed for the trouble to be identified in order to avoid the suspicion that they were shirking, and to have another precious operation to count towards their thirty.

  The establishment of a limit on operations showed an awareness in the upper reaches of the RAF of the weight that the crews were being asked to carry. But their concern stemmed from practical as much as humanitarian considerations. If the best and keenest airmen were allowed to continue until they were killed it would rob the organization of experienced, and perhaps inspirational, leaders. The point of nursing men through a first tour was so they could do a second, or even, some argued, a third. ‘Those men who return for their second tour are immensely valuable,’ a squadron commander told investigators from the RAF’s Flying Personnel Research Committee. ‘They are experienced, well-trained and teach the others. They usually come back as officers making valuable Flight Commanders or seconds in command.’ Even so there was a limit to what anyone could do and it was the responsibility of senior officers to impose it. Otherwise a good man was likely to feel bound by duty to push himself on until he was broken or dead.

  ‘Percy’ Pickard, the seemingly imperturbable, pipe-smoking star of Target for Tonight, survived seventy bombing trips and numerous missions dropping agents into France before being given command of 140 Wing. This was made up of three Mosquito squadrons and was tasked with low-level bombing in daylight. It was an unfortunate appointment. Night bombing was very different from precision daylight raiding and Pickard was, it appeared to those around him, worn out. Charles Patterson who flew with him, regarded him as a ‘splendid character. But it was quite plain to me that he should never have been allowed to go on. He was a nervous wreck … he was obsessed with getting on operations … but his brain was really too tired to really sit down and tackle the detail … it was quite obvious that he should have been rested, no matter how much he wanted to go on.’ Pickard’s wing was in 2 Group which was commanded by Basil Embry, who liked taking risks himself and did not mind ignoring the rule book. He had been shot down over Dunkirk in 1940 and captured, but escaped and made his way back to England via Spain and Gibraltar to fight again. As an Air Vice-Marshal he was considered too great a security risk be allowed back on operations. He nonetheless continued to take part in attacks flying under the pseudonym ‘Wing Commander Smith’. He could hardly refuse Pickard’s entreaties to get back into action. Patterson thought it a stupid and wrong decision. ‘A man who’d made a staggeringly splendid contribution to the war was denied his future … Embry ought to have recognized that after [so many] trips on light bombers there was no basis on which to start off a completely new career on low-level daylight bombing.’12 Pickard’s fame was such that senior French Resistance figures asked for him to lead a special operation in early 1944 to breach the walls of Amiens jail where dozens of their members were held awaiting execution. Operation Jericho was a success and 258 prisoners escaped. Pickard’s Mosquito was shot down leaving the target and he and his navigator Bill Broadley were killed.

  Later in the year the most illustrious name in Bomber Command kept what had seemed like an inevitable rendezvous with violent death. Guy Gibson had become a ‘professional hero’ as a result of the Dams Raid, in the words of his biographer Richard Morris. He was adopted by the prime minister and went with him to Canada in the late summer of 1944. There he embarked on an exhausting programme
of speeches, dinners and press conferences, playing up the strong comradeship between Canadian and British aircrews and trying to persuade America in general of the value of the strategic air campaign. On returning to Britain, with Churchill’s support, he sought and won the nomination for the Conservative seat of Macclesfield in Cheshire.

  But these were diversions. During 1944 he became increasingly restless with his safe, largely desk-bound new job and strained to get back on operations. Eventually his wish was granted. On 19 September, he made his debut as a bombing controller, directing a raid on the twin towns of Mönchengladbach and Rheydt, on the German-Dutch border. Gibson was flying a Mosquito, an aircraft with which he was unfamiliar. The marking was erratic and the bombing confused. After leaving the target area his aircraft ploughed into a polder near the Dutch town of Steenbergen. The Mosquito exploded in flames. He and his navigator, Squadron Leader James Warwick, were incinerated. Gibson was twenty-six. In common with several of the legendary airmen of the First World War, whose complexity and charisma he shares, his end was mysterious. The cause of the crash was never discovered.

  As well as accepting that there should be a restriction on the length of a tour, those at the top also understood that there was a limit to the losses that the organization could endure. This calculation was not a simple matter of manpower and resources. It was a question of effectiveness. If the campaign was to be pursued with the maximum aggression, what percentage of wastage could be sustained without a drastic fall in efficiency and morale? The proportion of aircraft missing from 1940 to the end of 1944 fluctuated from 1.8 per cent to 4.4 per cent of sorties dispatched. But during periods of intense activity such as the Battle of Berlin, losses could climb much higher. In January 1944, 11.4 per cent of the Halifaxes from 4 Group sent to Germany failed to return, a disaster that had resulted in them being withdrawn from operations against German targets.

  Bomber Command planners concluded that ‘the higher the loss rate the lower the level of experience and the lower the operational effectiveness.’ In other words, fewer veterans and more freshmen meant poorer results. Poor results and high losses were damaging to morale. It was efficiency rather than spirit, though, that was the main concern. A paper from the office of the director of bomber operations concluded that a strategic bomber force would become relatively ineffective if it suffered operational losses in the region of 7 per cent over a period of three months’ intensive operations, and that its operational effectiveness might become unacceptably low if losses of 5 per cent were sustained over this period.13 The definition of ineffectiveness was never spelled out. It appeared to mean a degree of carelessness, recklessness and absence of judgement that meant that the crews were more of a danger to themselves than they were to the enemy.

  During the first period of Harris’s command, from the end of February to the end of May 1942, the overall rate stood at 3.7 per cent. During the Battle of the Ruhr period it climbed to 4.3 per cent. But these were the figures for all operations and all units. Against specific targets and among individual units, levels could be much higher. The losses of aircraft attacking Berlin during the battle reached 6.3 per cent. Five squadrons, 75, 434, 620, 214 and 623 suffered appalling rates of between 15 and 20 per cent.

  On these sort of percentages, the chances of survival were pitifully small. It was officially calculated that with a loss rate of 8 per cent, only eight out of a hundred crews would finish a tour. The figure dropped to less than three crews if the figure rose to 11.4 per cent. Whatever the statistics the cold reality was that in 1942 less than half of all heavy bomber crews would survive their first tour and one in five would make it through a second. In 1943, only one in six could expect to survive one tour, and one in forty a second.14 The question of odds obsessed the crews and was the subject of endless debate. Optimists argued that the risk remained the same for each trip. Pessimists claimed that the laws of probability determined that it increased with every flight. Experience taught that some targets were less hazardous than others. The statistics bore this out. Bombing Germany was around four times more dangerous than bombing France.15 Yet, as the death of ‘Bull’ over Turin had demonstrated to Don Charlwood, there was no such thing as a safe destination.

  Nor, it seemed, did the skill of the captain and the expertise of the crew seem to make much difference. In January 1944 Dr Freeman Dyson at the operational research section at Bomber Command HQ made a statistical study of survival factors. An earlier report had confirmed the official doctrine that a crew’s chances of living increased with experience. ‘Unfortunately,’ Dyson wrote later, ‘when I repeated the study with better statistics and more recent data, I found that things had changed.’ His conclusion was ‘unambiguous’. The decrease of loss rate that came with growing experience, which had existed in 1942, was no longer present in 1944. There were many individual cases of experienced crews nursing home badly-damaged bombers that novice crews would have been unable to fly. But they ‘did not alter the fact that the total effect of all the skill and dedication of the experienced crews was statistically undetectable. Experienced and inexperienced crews were mown down as impartially as the boys who walked into the German machine gun nests at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.’16

  There were technical improvements which might have increased the survival rate. But no one in the upper reaches of Bomber Command seems to have paid them much attention. The provision of parachutes and the extensive escaping drill that was taught during training promoted the hope that even if you were shot down there was a realistic chance of surviving relatively unharmed. The truth was that the likelihood of emerging alive from a doomed aircraft was less than one in four. Of the 4,319 men aboard the 607 heavy bombers shot down attacking Berlin in the Battle, only 992 (22.9 per cent) survived. The odds altered depending on what aeroplane you were in. Lancasters, despite their reputation for general flying safety and reliability, were nonetheless difficult to escape from. The number of men surviving from a seven-man crew averaged 1.3 compared with 1.8 for a Stirling and 2.45 for a Halifax. The Hally enjoyed several features that increased crew safety. The escape hatches were easily accessible. The wireless operator and the navigator were in the nose of the aircraft, close to the forward escape hatch. In the Lancaster and Stirling they and the upper gunner were in the mid-section and had to claw their way along the fuselage past bulky equipment battling the dynamic forces of a plummeting machine to get out. To get to the rear door, they had to negotiate the main wing spar which ran across the body of the aircraft. This was difficult enough in normal clothing. Fully dressed and burdened with Mae West and parachute harness it was virtually impossible.17

  For the first years of the war pilots received some measure of protection from the steel plates fitted behind their seats. Later, as loads increased, they were sometimes removed, apparently to improve lifting capacity. Ken Newman ‘never saw bomber pilots so angry before or since’, after the move was announced in the summer of 1944.18 Little was done to investigate the merits of flak jackets, such as those issued to American airmen. The survival rates of the Americans were significantly better than those of Bomber Command.

  Dyson and his colleagues at the operational research centre thought hard about reducing casualties and came up with what they thought was a promising proposal. It was clear that the bombers’ .303 machine guns offered little or no protection from night-fighters. Why not rip out the two main gun turrets and their associated hydraulic machinery? This would lighten the aircraft’s weight and improve aerodynamic performance, add fifty miles per hour to its speed, and increase its manoeuvrability. Even if this did not significantly reduce aircraft losses it would definitely save lives, as gunners would no longer be needed. The proposal was passed up the line. The process of bureaucratic filtration, however, ‘eliminated our sharper criticisms and our more radical suggestions … the gun turrets remained in the bombers, and the gunners continued to die uselessly until the end of the war.’19

  After the German defences, the bigg
est enemy facing Bomber Command was the weather. The determination of Harris and his commanders to maintain a high tempo of aggression meant that operations often went ahead when to the eyes of the crews the conditions were unacceptably dangerous. The quality of weather forecasting was also extremely variable resulting in situations like that on the night of 16/17 December 1943 when twenty-nine Lancasters were lost and 148 men were killed trying to land in thick fog on returning from Berlin. To Ken Newman, who was finishing his training at 1656 Heavy Conversion Unit, Lindholme at the time, it seemed that ‘the fog should have been forecast and the attack aborted. We all strongly suspected that the weather forecasters had been ignored or over-ruled by the top brass. The atmosphere was such that we who were waiting in the wings for our turn to operate against Germany rapidly came to the conclusion that the Commander-in-Chief and his staff at Bomber Command – and Churchill come to that – regarded us in much the same light as the dyed-in-the-wool generals of the First World War regarded their soldiers – in a word, expendable.’20

  Yet for all the towering dangers of fog, flak and night-fighters, there was no discernible pattern to the way that death made its choices: Newman himself marvelled at how he had completed a full tour of thirty operations including eighteen to Germany and several others against heavily defended objectives and had ‘returned with my Lancaster undamaged with not even a scratch on the paint.’21

  The crews recognized the unpredictability of it all in the name they gave to what they did. ‘We nearly “diced” last night,’ Reg Fayers wrote to his wife on 7 October 1943. ‘It always happens the same night we come back from leave, but fortunately it was scrubbed.’ Two weeks later, looking forward to a promised leave he predicted that ‘we shall almost certainly “dice” again before then, and I’d rather we did. Too long between ops can be bad, and anyway we want to get them finished.’22