The temporal horizon extended no further than the next trip. ‘Useless business, this, thinking about the future,’ Guy Gibson wrote, and he was right.23 ‘It was pretty obvious that a lot of us were never going to return,’ said Bill Farquharson. ‘I was going to do all I could to stay alive but the chances were against me and I realized this.’
A Canadian in his squadron, 115, went as far as to keep a book on who would not be returning. ‘He used to say, “Do you know Bill, you’re on the chop list tonight?” and I’d say, “Oh am I? Jolly good Bob. What are the odds?” … anyway, chaps complained about it and he had to stop it. He [replied] that there was nothing wrong with it. We know some of us are not going to return. It was his way of overcoming [his] anxiety about not returning.’
Some men ticked off each trip in their diaries or in their heads as one step closer to safety. Farquharson preferred not to think about it. ‘I really tried not to count. You can’t help it though – another one off. You had to treat every trip in exactly the same way, no matter how easy you might think it might be … you didn’t let up on anything as far as I was concerned and neither did the crew.’24
Everyone shared the warm but illogical conviction that whatever might happen to the others, they were going to beat the odds. Whatever Dyson’s research might say, there was great comfort to be had in exercising a rigorous professionalism so that death if it came was due to fate rather than inefficiency. Harry Yates believed that a rough pattern developed in the way a tour progressed. ‘A tour was a construct of three aspects,’ he wrote, ‘each distinct, each characterized by a potentially lethal weakness. In the beginning, of course, was naivety. A few hours flying together at OTU and Finishing School barely qualified as preparation for the real thing. From the moment a sprog crew arrived on station it had to learn – before the lesson was driven home by the enemy. There was plenty of help at hand. The path to survival was well-trodden even though not everyone reached its end.’
The dozen or so ops in the middle of the tour, he thought ‘tended to coincide with the assumption that this learning period was over. The log book was filling up. The enemy and Lady Luck had done their worst. One was not blasé about being shot at but had reached a certain, internal accommodation with it. Instead of operating at maximum vigilance throughout, there might … perhaps … occasionally be a tendency to cut corners or relax a little. But might and occasionally were enough. Even that was complacency and it invited the Reaper along for the ride.’ Towards journey’s end aircrew had survived and surmounted these hazards. They were secure in the knowledge of their own expertise. ‘But then came the even more insidious danger of staleness. It was all too easy to weary of the sheer repetition of operational life. The months of Battle Orders and Briefings were bound to pall, along with the pills to keep you wide-eyed or to knock you out; the ops scrubbed on the tarmac and others re-ordered because of scattered bombing; and always, the pals known but briefly and who, in the relentless drive to mount the next op, somehow went unmourned.’
Of these three killers, he believed, ‘the cruellest was naivety, but the most undeserved was this business of going stale like old bread.’25
Before the thirty-trip limit came in some commanders had already noted the tendency of crews to get sloppy when they thought they saw safety beckoning. One wing commander reported that ‘if ever I hear a man say “this is my last trip” either I don’t send him on the trip or I tell him he has another dozen to do, then send him twice more and unexpectedly take him off.’26
The confidence that mounted with the accumulation of operations was never robust enough to displace fear. Indeed as the end of the trip approached it was common to feel a gathering anxiety that at the last moment the prize of life would be snatched away. There were many stories of crews going missing on their last but one mission. Fear is unsustainable for protracted periods. It waxes and wanes, not always in direct proportion to the current level of peril. Everyone felt it. Most extraordinarily, almost everyone managed to control it. The first thing to do was to acknowledge its existence. David Stafford-Clark, one of the few trained psychologists to work as a medical officer on a bomber station, observed that it was acceptable to show fear. ‘[Men] could say “I’m scared shitless” and that was fine.’27 This frankness was echoed in one of the songs that raised the roof of mess and pub in many an eastern county town, sung to the tune of ‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’.
They say there’s a Lancaster leaving the Ruhr
Bound for old Blighty’s shore
Heavily laden with terrified men
All lying prone on the floor …
The most powerful antidote to terror was the greater anxiety of losing control in front of one’s colleagues. The Mosquito pilot Charles Patterson listened with mounting alarm as his commanding officer briefed him on a mission that appeared to have only the slimmest chance of success. He and his navigator were to fly alone over Magdeburg and return via Berlin and Rostock to obtain an up-to-date weather report in advance of a major raid that evening. The aircraft would be pushing its range to the limit. As there were no other daylight operations scheduled, that day his lonely Mosquito presented the sole target on offer to the entire might of the Luftwaffe. ‘To show how bad it was … the squadron commander said he was sorry that he’d had to send me on this. But it had to be done. Somebody had to do it. And he looked at me and said with a twinkle in his eye “and you’re not married you, see. Which is a factor we have to take into account.”’
As he crossed the Suffolk coast climbing to reach his operational height of 25,000 feet he ‘began not to feel myself, and then this feeling got worse … I thought this is awful … it had crossed my mind [something] which I couldn’t control, was taking me over.’ He considered turning back but was immediately struck by an even more unpleasant sensation. ‘The thing that came to my mind was that if I went back I would have to say to Eddie [the CO] when I landed, and he said “why have you come back?” – I would have to say, “… because I don’t feel well …” I suddenly saw in my mind clear as daylight … him standing in front of me while I said it. And the thought of that was so appalling that I just kept going on climbing.’ The feeling of nausea turned out not to be panic at all but anoxia caused by a disconnected oxygen pipe. Patterson reflected later that ‘the interesting thing was that such was the force of Eddie’s influence over his pilots and his crews that it was purely the thought of him that made me keep going, even when I was running out of oxygen at 25,000 feet.’28
Nor did anyone want to be thought of as having let down those who kept them in the air. That meant the entire base. ‘Aircrew were regarded on the station as pretty special,’ said Michael Beetham. ‘When you went off on operations masses of people would be down at the end of runway cheering and waving you on your way. Your ground crew would get round and make sure that everything was right on the aeroplane and be really looking after you to see that everything was perfect … How could you chicken out really? … that was a driving force. You were being made something special. It’s something you had to live up to and you feared letting them down more than you feared the German defences. I regarded it that way and I found it very uplifting.’29
Ultimately, though, it was the respect of the crew that mattered most. In David Stafford-Clark’s experience a crew member might decide halfway through the tour that he was going to ‘go LMF’. Then ‘the crew would say stop talking rubbish. We’re all going to finish this together. And then the end of the story is that they all do finish together but maybe they only finish together because on the next trip they’re shot down. But leaving the crew meant letting the side down. Somebody else has to come in. It is very, very disruptive and traumatic. It happened very, very rarely.’ It did, however, happen.30
13
Crack Up
One day early in 1945 the crews of 150 Squadron were ordered to the parade ground of their base at Hemswell and told to form three sides of a square. As they stood to attention a sergeant was m
arched into their midst by the station warrant officer. The sergeant had been found guilty by a court-martial of avoiding his duty. His punishment was a period of detention and reduction to the ranks. According to Dennis Steiner who was there ‘the Adjutant read the sentence and when he got to the words “reduced to the rank of aircraftman” the SWO who was standing a pace behind the sergeant, took a took a pace forward and ripped off his sergeant’s chevrons which had already been unpicked and lightly tacked on. At the end of the sentencing, he was made to double off the square, no doubt to a period of misery.’ It was, Steiner, thought, ‘a most humiliating performance for everyone’.
The prisoner’s story was pitiful. At the end of his limits of endurance, he had tried to get extra leave by telephoning the squadron office from a public telephone by the main entrance of the base, pretending to be his wife’s doctor and warning that she was seriously ill. The sergeant was immediately given leave but on returning tried the subterfuge again. Suspicions were roused and he was watched and caught making another fake call.1
Jack Currie witnessed a similar ceremony at Wickenby after two Canadian gunners were found guilty of desertion, having failed to turn up at a pre-op briefing. ‘The runaways eventually returned to face the inevitable court-martial, and it was ordained, perhaps pour encourager les autres, that the sentence be pronounced before us all.’ On a cool, grey morning the full complement of the base was mustered by flights and squadrons on the parade ground. ‘The Station Commander made his entrance, wearing his peaked cap with the “scrambled egg” instead of the usual faded forage cap … the drama of the day began.’ The miscreants were marched on to the parade ground from the left flank. In a formal, toneless voice, the adjutant read out the charges and the sentence of the court.
‘The ensign,’ wrote Currie, ‘stirred limply on the staff. At the rear of No. 3 Squadron there was a quickly stilled disturbance as a fainting aircraftman was led away. As silence fell again, the Station Commander marched to one of the offenders and, with sure, quick movements, ripped the chevrons from each sleeve and the brevet from the breast. The gunner was a tall, aquiline fellow who might have stepped from a page of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. He stood erect and motionless, staring straight ahead. The grey-blue sleeve showed darker where the tapes had been. The other gunner stood with shoulders bowed, and would not raise his eyes. He flinched at the Station Commander’s touch. It was a dreadful moment.’2
Such ceremonial degradations were unforgettable and intended to be so. Yet courts-martial were used only rarely to maintain discipline. They were messy and time-consuming. By the time the proceedings began, witnesses had often been posted away or were dead. Usually they were fellow-airmen who detested the idea of ratting on a comrade.
It was, anyway, impossible to put on trial every member of Bomber Command who displayed signs of weakness. The existing martial law contained in the Air Force Act was much too heavy an instrument to deal with problems which, as the RAF had been forced to recognize from the earliest days, were inherent to combat aviation.
In the First World War both the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service had accepted that pilots could break down under the stresses of their work. Rest homes were set up in the stylish Channel resort of Le Touquet where officers could recover after being ordered there by the squadron medical officer. There was a consensus among early researchers, some of whom had direct experience of the air war, that psychological pressures were as powerful as physical strain. When a man broke down, as he invariably would if he kept on long enough, it was a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. Fear, and its consequences, were the natural response to the unique rigours of aerial combat.
By the start of the next war, this commonsensical analysis had given way to a new view, expressed by men fluent in the theories of modern psychology. This maintained that character was the most important factor in how an individual coped with the mental buffeting of war. For all the modernity of those who framed it, it was a regressive perspective but it came to dominate the RAF’s approach to psychological casualties. It was laid out in an Air Ministry pamphlet circulated among medical officers just before the start of the war. It restated the opinion that stress was cumulative and that ‘everyone has a breaking point’. However it tended to blame character defects, rather than the accumulation of fear, for psychological collapse.3
‘Morale [it read] is of the greatest importance both in the maintenance of efficiency and in the prevention of breakdown. It depends largely upon the individual’s possession of those controlling forces which inhibit the free expression of the primitive instinctive tendencies. It is based upon the sentiments acquired during education and training. Its essence is the ability to live up to an ideal, to face dangers and difficulties with confidence and tenacity of purpose, and to be able to sacrifice personal interests and safety in the course of duty.’4 In other words, good morale would overcome the base desire to run away. It could be inculcated by the right upbringing and reinforced by service discipline and values. But essentially it was a matter of character. Strong characters displayed patriotism, tenacity, and self-sacrifice. The weak were vacillating, undependable and ineffective.
In a well-organized selection and training programme such types should have been identified and discarded long before they reached a squadron. The RAF training programmes by the middle of the war were indeed thorough and efficient. Nonetheless, some men deemed unsatisfactory still got through. The question was how to deal with them.
Despite the reversion to Victorian notions of the paramountcy of character, the system had some elasticity. It acknowledged the omnipresence of fear and was subtle enough to perceive that orders were carried out with varying degrees of enthusiasm. From early in the war the RAF tried to devise a method for deciding who was unable to fly because of a genuine psychological condition, and who was simply unwilling. The next step was to form a plan for patching up the former and getting rid of the latter.
Most of the work on aviation psychology was done by two men, civilian specialists who had joined the RAF medical service in 1939. They were Charles Symonds, who became the senior consultant in neuropsychiatry and rose to the rank of Air Vice-Marshal, and a younger practioner, Denis Williams. In a key report, which appeared in August 1942, Symonds and Williams set out the findings of their investigation of psychological disorders in flying personnel of Bomber Command.5 Much of the evidence contained in it came from questionnaires and interviews with station and squadron commanders and medical officers.
They started off by making a disinction between flying stress and the effects that arose from it. The former was defined as ‘the load of mental and physical strain imposed upon a man by flying under war conditions’. The effects varied depending on ‘the weight of the load, and the mental and physical stamina of the individual’. When the load grew too heavy to carry, the strain could be manifested in signs of ‘fatigue, anxiety, or inefficiency’ and in any number of other ways.
Commanders and medical officers were instructed to keep their charges under constant observation. It was a complicated task. The guidelines for spotting signs of deterioration and the variety of recorded symptoms were highly detailed and sometimes contradictory. Following the official advice also required a reasonably close knowledge of the personality of the man in question for any alteration in his manner to be noticed. Bomber squadrons contained up to 200 airmen. They were subdivided into crews, often hermetically sealed social subdivisions. There was the further barrier created by commissioned and non-commissioned rank. It was hard for commanders to know all of their men well, though the best of them, and the more conscientious medical officers, tried.
The symptoms fell into four categories: changes in appearance, talk and behaviour, loss of keenness for flying duties, loss of efficiency and alcoholic excess. Strain changed people in different ways. One general rule seemed to be that sufferers began to behave in a manner that was in complete contrast to their normal conduct. ‘A quiet man will become so
ciable and garrulous,’ observed one medical officer, ‘and a normal man quiet, solitary and moody.’ In others, their usual demeanour became sharply exaggerated. ‘The change in behaviour has no particular direction,’ a station commander reported. ‘They are apt to be a bit more extreme in their behaviour one way or the other.’
Essentially, any behaviour that appeared out of the ordinary, and life in a bomber squadron allowed considerable latitude, was a ground for concern. The signs ranged from ‘making weak remarks around the mess and roaring with laughter at them’ to ‘becoming irritable, sarcastic, truculent and out for trouble.’ In contrast, ‘unusual quietness, with a desire for solitude’ was equally worrying, especially if the subject had previously been a good mixer. ‘He ceases to be one of the party. He may remain in it without interest, or keep drifting away, starting a game of shove-halfpenny, but soon losing interest in even that. He breaks off a conversation and … later becomes unoccupied and lacks all initiative.’ They tended to sit around in armchairs, staring blankly ahead or dozing. They looked ‘tired and haggard, pale, worried, tense and nervy or miserable and depressed’. Undue reference to the events that had wrought these changes also signalled danger. ‘He talks about the people who have been shot down in the searchlights. In discussion in the mess he enlarges on the casualties and in his mind leans toward the dangers rather than concentrating on the job in hand.’
This sad condition of loneliness and anxiety was characterized by a station commander as a ‘state of alarm’. With it often came an increased consumption of cigarettes and alchohol. Most of the crew members smoked and drank. Getting drunk was a natural and recognized antidote to the strain of the job as well as the most common means of celebrating survival. It took some doing to stand out.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 80