Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  It seems strange that someone so clearly lacking enthusiasm should ever have reached an operational squadron. His commanding officer wasted little sympathy when submitting his recommendation. ‘I consider [wrote J. F. H. du Boulay] that this NCO has been drawing aircrew pay without earning it since enlistment and that he is a coward with no qualifications for a commission in any trade, or NCO’s rank. As a Flight Sergeant his example is deplorable and I request that he may be removed from this Squadron immediately. I strongly recommend that he be deprived of his Air Gunner’s badge, reduced to the ranks and made to refund part of the pay which he has received without earning it since his enlistment.’19

  This was an open and shut case. Sergeant X appeared to belong to that group of men identified by David Stafford-Clark who had passed the point where they cared what anyone thought of them. That of Sergeant Y, a wireless operator with 150 Squadron, which occurred at the same time, was more complex. He too, the official correspondence reported, announced that ‘he has completely lost confidence in himself and no longer wishes to continue operational flying.’ Searching for reasons to explain his loss of nerve his commanding officer reported that he had crashed-landed when his aircraft ran out of fuel returning from his first op but no one had been injured. That had been to Lille, a relatively easy target. Since then he had been to Essen four times and carried out one mining trip. In his report Wing Commander E. J. Carter, the 150 Squadron CO, remarked that ‘at no time has Y been subjected to any particularly bad experience.’ Yet Essen in the summer of 1942 was one of the most dangerous destinations. Y had carried out four operations in eight days at the beginning of June. They were all launched between 4.35 and 6.35 in the evening. Given the summer light they might as well have been carried out in broad daylight.20

  He would seem to have suffered a classic reaction. The crews themselves had noticed that pessimism and optimism came in cycles. The same appeared to be true of fear. Symonds and Williams reckoned there were three critical periods in a tour and the first six ops were the toughest. Their reporters observed that ‘between the third and sixth trip there is a great likelihood of “waverers” reporting that they cannot go on with their duty. There was striking agreement in the story. “In the first few trips he sees what he is up against, in the next he makes an effort, but by the sixth he has thrown his hand in.” He usually manages the first three. He is invariably an unsuitable individual and the outlook is usually hopeless.’ Another critical period came around the twelfth to fourteenth operation, when the dangers of the business were appallingly clear but the end of the tour stretched dismayingly into the distance. In such cases men ‘with explanation and encouragement control their fear, and nearly all go back to complete their tour.’ Some who had endured a particularly hard run tended to flag when there were only five or six trips left to go and the finishing line was in sight. These, the specialists recommended, if rested, would go back to fulfil their duty. The same was true of those who had been shaken up by a particularly nasty experience such as a bad crash or a forced landing in the sea.21

  The need to deal with nervous cases was recognized by the crews. As Harry Yates pointed out, ‘no crew could afford to have one of their number snap on board and plunge everything into hysteria and chaos.’ But despite all the official thought that went into the subject, manifest in the dense thickets of procedure, there was still a widespread belief among those doing the fighting that the system was insensitive and sometimes unjust. They knew better than anyone the difference between a coward and a man who had reached the limits of his courage. They also resented the calculated humiliation of men who, whatever their failings, had volunteered to serve at the axe-edge of the war.

  An instructor who served with Doug Mourton at the OTU at Wellesbourne refused to fly with a partly-trained crew when Harris drafted in OTU personnel to make up the numbers for the Cologne ‘thousand’ raid. He reasoned that having survived one tour ‘he did not want to get killed with a crew who were not very proficient.’ When Mourton returned from the operation his friend had disappeared.

  He had been found guilty of LMF … the punishment would have been that he would be stripped of his sergeant’s stripes and crown and sent to another station. The marks where his sergeant’s stripes had been removed would be perfectly obvious and everybody would know what had happened to him. Besides this he would have been given no trade and as a consequence would be given all the tasks of an air force station, such as washing up, cleaning out latrines etc. It was quite a severe punishment for somebody who, just on one occasion, had refused to fly. And he would have been quite happy to have been posted to an operational squadron as part of an experienced crew.22

  No one seemed to know what happened to LMF cases after they disappeared from sight. Where to put them was a continuing problem for the authorities. Initially they were sent to the RAF depot at Uxbridge but their proximity to airmen in training was thought to be bad for morale. Later they were posted to the Combined Aircrew Reselection Centre at Eastchurch in Kent where the same objection was encountered. There was a further move to the Aircrew Disposal Unit at Chessington in Surrey. There they were isolated from other airmen and treated humanely. The regime was intended to improve their self-esteem, restore their confidence and rebuild their belief in the war effort through ‘motivational’ lectures with titles like ‘What Shall We Do With Germany?’ and patriotic films. Under the benign eye of the commander, Squadron Leader R. I. Barker, they visited cathedrals and zoos and attended a weekly dance in the drill hall.

  When Chessington was taken over by Balloon Command there was a final move to Keresley Grange near Coventry, where on 8 May 1945, the inmates trooped to the local church for a service of thanksgiving for victory in Europe.

  The war was barely over before the term LMF became an embarrasment to the RAF and it was dropped in 1945. The numbers of people accused of it have never been firmly established. A scholarly recent study of the subject has calculated that an average of 200 cases of LMF were identified each year in Bomber Command.23 Given the stresses of their occupation the figure seems very small. It can be seen, from one side, as an indication of the stigmatizing power of the charge of cowardice. More importantly it is a tribute to the remarkable steadfastness of the vast majority of those who flew with Bomber Command.

  14

  Home Front

  When the crews touched down at the end of a mission they were returning to a monochrome world of flat fields, dank huts, drab food and weak beer. The memoirs of the pilots of the Battle of Britain are suffused with the sunshine of the summer of 1940. In the letters and diaries of the Bomber Boys it seems to be always cold and dark, no matter what the season. Life on bomber bases was often dismal and primitive, far removed from the elegance and comfort enjoyed by the pre-war RAF. A lucky few were installed in well-equipped stations that had been built to the highest specifications in the nineteen-thirties. The majority lived in the cheap, temporary constructions thrown up all over East Anglia, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire as the campaign got under way. The pre-war bases looked like giant architect’s maquettes with their neat brick rows, hedges and flower beds. In wartime even a permanent base like Wyton in Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire) was transformed, as a civilian visitor noted, into an ugly sprawl of ‘endless puddles, barracks, warehouses full of bombs [and the] rusting wreckage of damaged equipment not worth repairing.’1

  The RAF spent lavishly on maintaining its front-line aircraft. It was miserly when it came to the welfare of its front-line troops. They were housed ten to a Nissen hut, thirty-six feet long by sixteen feet wide corrugated iron humps which had no insulation. The only heat came from a coke-burning stove and in the bitter winters of the war years they became an icy purgatory. The men slept on iron bedsteads under rough blankets, whose meagre warmth had to be supplemented by the addition of a greatcoat when the temperature dropped. They washed in distant ablution blocks reached along muddy pathways in water that was seldom more than tepid. These privations did not
extend to the ‘penguins’, the non-flying base adminstration staff who often lived in greater comfort than the crews they were supposed to look after.

  Bad conditions caused resentment and chipped away at morale. Shortly after arriving at his Heavy Conversion Unit at Wigsley near Newark in Nottinghamshire in the autumn of 1943 George Hull sent a gloomy letter to his friend Joan Kirby. ‘I seem to have fallen decidedly into the soup or what have you in being posted to this station,’ he wrote. ‘Even the name is obnoxious. Wigsley, ugh! Pigsley would be more appropriate yet I doubt whether any pig would care to be associated with it. The camp is dispersed beyond reason. If I never had a bike I doubt if I could cope with the endless route marches that would otherwise be necessary. Messing is terrible, both for food and room to eat it. Normally we queue for half an hour before we can even sit, waiting for it. Washing facilities are confined to a few dozen filthy bowls and two sets of showers an inch deep in mud and water.

  Hull and his companions tried to alleviate the misery by heading to the nearest pub each evening and returning ‘three parts cut’. At Wigsley, Hull’s disillusionment with the RAF touched bottom. ‘Don’t for a moment … imagine that I want to be associated with the above nonsense’ he wrote, a reference to the RAF crest at the top of the headed notepaper, which he had scored through with four angry lines.

  Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, which sat on the plain between the River Humber and the city of York, was notoriously uncomfortable. James Hampton, who served with 76 Squadron, declared that ‘on no other Royal Air Force station, before or after, did I ever encounter such intolerable living conditions.’ On arriving at his Nissen hut in August 1944 he found it completely empty of furniture. Previous inhabitants had fed it all to the stove when the coke ran out. The only fittings were shelves, provided to store personal possessions, which the authorities had sensibly decided to have made out of asbestos. One wash house had to do for 400 aircrew, who queued up for the sixteen tin bowls and a few showers.2

  But stoicism and resignation were Bomber Boy virtues. The men grumbled, but at least they were alive. With that in mind, they could put up with almost anything. Dennis Field found Tuddenham, in Suffolk, with its widely-dispersed sites and intermittently heated water, no different from any other pre-fab station he had been on. But it was ‘Utopia compared with the jungle, desert, Italian mud or Arctic Sea.’3 Newly installed at Holme, Sergeant Reg Fayers described his new quarters to his wife. The wash house was ‘tastefully decorated in yellow, brown and rust with a discarded thrush’s nest stuck up on one of the pipes … so I washed in clean soft water – why does cold water seem so much more clean? – and sang my bloomin’ head off … then in my boudoir wear – wellingtons, pyjama trousers, tunic dressing gown of tender RAF blue with a navigator’s badge rampant and oil stains magnificent I paraded into my study to write good morning to my wife.’

  Fayers’s ‘study’ was a corner of his Nissen hut, which, he reported, ‘is just about the nearest we airmen get to “home” … Out of [the] roaring night and with ground mists at dawn garlanding the morning and welcoming our return we come tiredly and competently down to egg and bacon and this – a bed … faithfully waiting in the corner of a corrugated tunnel, MY bed because my two kitbags stand by it, my three-year-old slippers proudly inscribed FAYERS on the left and 963752 on the right, stand under it and my tunic hangs from … one nail.’ It was ‘a place to sleep … a place for dreams; that’s my home darling.’4

  Fayers was a romantic. There was another way of looking at things. Don Charlwood remembered the lowering experience of returning to Elsham after a mid-winter leave and opening the hut door to be met by ‘the smell of last night’s fire, of dirty clothes and unwashed bodies … gunners were asleep in shirts that appeared to have been welded to their bodies by the dirt of weeks.’5

  Communal living shrank the boundaries of privacy. It was only rarely that a man could be alone. Frank Blackman, who described himself in a letter to his girlfriend Mary Mileham as ‘somewhat lacking in the boisterous aspects of manliness’, sometimes found the public nature of air force life intolerable. On 8 July 1943 he settled down in his room at East Moor in Yorkshire to write to her but was almost immediately interrupted. Even though he was an officer, he shared a room with three Canadians. ‘The first has just come in and as usual when he has had a few beers is so talkative that he keeps on without stopping for more than a yes or no to keep him company. As I write now he is giving me a dissertation on flak, fighter belts, searchlights and relative losses of aircraft etc. … I’ve no doubt that unless I’m rude to him which I fear I shall be very shortly he will finish up on navigation – which is his final subject when all else fails. By the time he quietens down the other two will be in and then goodbye to all peace. They’ve been in to York and one at least will be tight.’ The disturbance did not necessarily end when sleep descended. One of Blackman’s roommates had been ‘having nightmares and has kept us in fits of laughter after the preliminary shock of being woken up at about 3 a.m. [by him] hollering his head off.’6

  A room of one’s own, even one so basic as that allotted to Ken Newman at Lindholme after he received his commission, was the peak of gracious living. It was ‘simply but adequately furnished, with a built-in wardrobe and a basin with hot and cold water. Better still there was a WAAF batwoman to make the bed and clean the room as well as polish my shoes and buttons. It felt like heaven in comparison with the sergeants’ barrack room and particularly the Nissen huts that I had been living in …’7

  As front-line warriors the crews might have reasonably thought they were entitled to the best food available. Their diet, though, was little better than that endured by civilians. They counted themselves lucky to sit down to bacon and eggs before they took off and again when they landed. Additional luxuries were rare. When not flying they lived on Spam and dried eggs, sausages and lumps of nameless fish. They filled the gaps with bread, smeared thinly with margarine and fishpaste or jam. To supplement the shortages of fresh produce there were plates of vitamin capsules to which the airmen were expected to help themselves.

  To guarantee a share of this sparse fare you had to arrive early. Breakfast in the sergeants’ mess at Holme started at 7.30. By 7.45 the meagre supplies of cereal and milk had run out. Tempers were short at the start of the day. The aircrew sergeants were allocated an area that was far too small for their numbers and they often had to wait until a table became free followed by a further delay until a harassed waitress was able to serve them. The permanent staff sergeants had a separate dining room which, the crews noted with bitterness, was rarely more than half full.

  The Canadians were appalled at what they were expected to eat in British messes. At Abingdon, Ralph Wood had his first encounter with brussels sprouts, ‘a kind of minature cabbage, eaten boiled. At our mess the cook must have boiled them and reboiled them until they emerged a sickly green gob … Small wonder that we looked forward to a snack in the village where we had the big choice of Welsh rarebit … beans on toast, or fishpaste on toast.’8

  Letters home throb with a sensual yearning for peacetime food. The occasional parcels of treats sent by family and friends were received with rapture. ‘Darling,’ wrote Reg Fayers to Phyllis, ‘I’m eating myself to death in a lovely orgy of pears, grapes and apples.’ Bernard Dye felt it worth recording in his diary on 9 January 1944 the simple entry: ‘received two oranges and two lemons’.9 Doug Mourton befriended a worker at a farm near his Driffield base who supplied him with buckets of chitterlings, a doubtful mix of pig liver and stomach lining, which he would never have touched in peacetime. Mourton was extremely resourceful at scrounging. The British crews were envious of the lavish food parcels, packed with luxuries like tinned cheese and butter, received by the Canadian crews. He and his friend Jock noticed that when a new consignment arrived a list of recipients was pinned up at the local post office. ‘Jock and I would look down this list and when the names corresponded with people who had been killed we went [in] and claimed the
food parcels. We would then cycle back … and excitedly open the parcels, which contained tinned meat, chocolates and other items that were very hard to come by, indeed non-existent in England …’10

  Even in the depths of wartime, luxury was available if you could pay for it. George Hull’s friend Joan Kirby who was serving with the WRNS at the HMS Cabbala shore base in Lancashire reported to her family that she had ‘been having some nice food lately. Not at Cabbala I hasten to add but at the Midland in Manchester on Sunday, namely hors d’oeuvres, lobster, cream sauce etc. brandy trifle and cream, coffee and drinks.’ Her host at the hotel was a ‘Yankee named Bob. He’s a really nice chap for a change and as long as we keep on being hungry at the same time and he’s still got some money he suits me.’ Such largesse was way beyond the pocket of a British airman. Bomber Boys were more likely to experience the sort of dates that Dennis Field took his future wife Betty on in Cambridge, where she was studying at Homerton College. On fine evenings they would spend pleasant hours wandering along the Backs. But ‘on cold, wet and dark nights it meant joining a queue in the hopeful expectation of seeing a film. It did not matter what was on because it would be warm and dry inside. Alternatively, after a long wait we might get a couple of seats in a café and make beans on toast and a cup of tea last as long as possible. The only other possibility was to shelter under a dripping tree in the park and admire the view in the blackout. The glow of cigarettes, the nearest equivalent to a brazier, from neighbouring elms showed that we were not alone in our predicament.’11 It was unsurprising that the Yanks stirred envy and hostility in the breasts of their British counterparts.