Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  Dennis returned to Hemswell again in 1988 for the 170 Squadron annual service with his wife and children. A Lancaster flew overhead as usual but the base was much changed. Two of the barracks blocks housed antiques centres, another was an old people’s home and the officers’ mess had been turned into a hotel. A market was set in the grounds at weekends. He ‘walked around with some disbelief and sadness.’ The market was held on the spot where many years before his room-mate had been killed when his aircraft crashed. ‘I wonder if,’ he wrote shortly after the visit, ‘when the Lancaster had flown past in tribute to those who lost their lives, people paused in their hunt for bargains and looked up, if they knew why it had flown over and also, if they cared. I think that I shall not return.’18

  The dead were never far away on these occasions. Between September 1939 and May 1945, Bomber Command lost 47,268 men killed on operations. Another 8,305 were killed in flying or training accidents. Another 1,570 groundcrew and WAAFs lost their lives from other causes. The total of 57,143 amounts to more than one tenth of the military war dead of Britain and the Commonwealth. It is a considerably higher figure than the 38,384 officers from the British Empire lost in the First World War. This toll was considered as a catastrophe, a slaughter of the paladins that blighted the post-war years. The deaths of so many Bomber Boys must be counted as another epic tragedy.

  For those who came through, no peacetime experience could match the intensity of those short, terrible months when they flew and fought. The war was always there, stirring into life at the slightest nudge. ‘At sixty-six, I sit looking out of my window,’ wrote Cy March, forty-five years after it was all over, ‘watching seagulls gliding, soaring, side-slipping and wheeling around. I think the old Lancaster could do all that … I also sit and watch the sunset, truly a work of God, the sheer beauty of the reds, golds and many other lovely colours. Then I think of the sunsets we created, also beautiful in a terrible way with unearthly colours flickering and brightening, the blue flashes from the cookies, the bright red bursts of flak, lit up by searchlights and fires, all created by man’s inhumanity to man.’19

  Epilogue

  WENT THE DAY WELL?

  With peacetime the complex human cell structure of Bomber Command dissolved. There was no need for Bomber Boys in the post-war world. They dispersed as rapidly as they had come together, settling down in every corner of the country and beyond, working at every occupation. In my early days, doing holiday jobs, I sometimes came across them in offices and factories. The war was the last thing they talked about. But somehow their experiences seemed to mark them out from the other ex-servicemen in the workforce.

  Some of the survivors stayed on in the RAF. Michael Beetham had a distinguished career, retiring after forty-one years in 1982 as Marshal of the Royal Air Force and Chief of the Air Staff. He held the post longer than any of his predecessors. As a member of the Chiefs of Staff committee, he played a crucial role in the direction of the Falkands War. Ken Newman obtained a permanent commission and left, aged fifty, as a wing commander before starting a satisfying chapter of life in school and charity administration.

  Most still thought of themselves as civilians and were happy to get out of uniform. Arthur Taylor shed his air force blue for a demob ‘overcoat, sports coat, flannels and a pair of shoes’, in January 1946. ‘I felt,’ he wrote, ‘that when the war in Europe was over [and] the enemy had been beaten there was no longer any purpose in my staying on … I had had the good fortune to serve with some fine people in a fine organization and was pleased to have survived the experience.’ He joined the civil service working for the Department of Employment until retiring with his wife in Norfolk, where he passed his time painting, gardening and rambling.1

  The feat of survival brought no advantages. Dennis Steiner had to wait until July 1946 to be demobilized. He ended his RAF career as a pilot officer and by now was a married man. He went back to the office in Wimbledon he had left as a junior to be told that he would receive the same wages he was on when he joined up. ‘I could not have had a clearer indication that the war was over,’ he remembered.

  Settling down was difficult, especially for someone like Leonard Cheshire who by the end had flown a record one hundred missions. He finished his war looking down on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 as an atomic bomb exploded over it. In 1948 he offered his Hampshire home to a terminally-ill ex-serviceman who had nowhere to go to die. From this act of humanity grew the foundation that carries his name. It flourishes today in fifty-two countries bringing hope and help to the disabled.

  Some were able to take up where they had left off when the war came along. After liberation from a German PoW camp, Reg Fayers returned to Sudbury, Suffolk, and his wife Phyllis, and joined her father in his dairy business. He resumed his old sporting career, playing football for Sudbury Town. Reg and Phyllis had a son and daughter. The family moved to west Wales. Reg took took up farming and wrote a book about it, The Sheep of Dolgwili. ‘I suppose it was “happy ever after,”’ he says now.2

  The need to write was strong. It had been Don Charlwood’s ambition since boyhood. After leaving school in the seaside town of Frankston, near Melbourne, in 1932, he approached the Australian newspaper baron Keith Murdoch for a reporter’s job, but was only offered the chance to be a messenger. He managed to sell some short stories while working as a farmhand before volunteering for the RAAF in 1940.

  In 1943 Don and his crew became the first in 103 Squadron in nine months to survive a tour. On returning to Australia he worked for thirty years in air-traffic control. He recorded his Bomber Command experiences movingly and perceptively in one of the finest books of the war, No Moon Tonight. He has written many others and now lives in happy and honoured retirement in Warrandyte, Victoria. One of the benign side effects of the strategic bombing campaign was that it produced a crop of outstanding literature, as powerful as anything that emerged from the trenches. It includes Jack Currie’s Lancaster Target and Luck and a Lancaster by Harry Yates, classic memoirs which ring with authenticity.

  Noble Frankland had a different kind of literary career. As well as writing the official history he became director of the Imperial War Museum and played a large part in the production of The World At War, the Thames Television epic, produced in the 1970s and as yet unsurpassed.

  Most settled into quiet anonymity. Reg Payne went back to Kettering and a job in an engineering factory and later became a technical teacher in a local college. He took up painting evocative pictures of Lancasters in flight and rural scenes. Willie Lewis went to sea on a trawler, sailing from Hull on gruelling three-week trips to the Arctic Circle. Cy March returned to the mines.

  The dead lived their unrealized lives in the memories of those they left behind. The love of George Hull’s brief life, Joan Kirby, married and became Joan Hatfield. George seemed to be sitting in the corner of her cosy living room in Christchurch, Dorset, as we talked about him on an autumn Saturday afternoon. ‘He was a great believer in social justice,’ she said as her husband made the tea. ‘Had he lived he would have been a leader in some form. It wasn’t until after the war that I realized quite what marvellous material he would have been … he was a lovely chap. Hardly a day passes when I don’t think of him.’3

  Mary Mileham never quite forgot Frank Blackman. She destroyed most of her wartime correspondence but could not bring herself to get rid of Frank’s letters. She offered them instead to the Imperial War Museum in the hope that they would give ‘some idea of the pain and anguish felt by those flying boys … the longing and wishing for peace and love’. Before she did, she wrote to a friend explaining what the relationship had meant. ‘It was healing for me to be so needed and some solace to him that I was faithfully there for a few months.’ But she felt that ‘in peacetime it would not have been any good and had already begun to fade’.4 After the war she married Patrick Lindsay who worked as a musical arranger at the BBC and lived contentedly with him in an old cottage in Sussex. She died in November 1993.

 
; Frances Scott had a miserable few months after her broken Bomber Command romance. Then she met another Bomber Boy, became Frances Dowdeswell, and settled down to a happy married life.

  Peter Johnson carried his doubts about the war he had fought into peacetime. He stayed on in the air force, taking part in the Berlin air lift and serving in the mid-fifties as civil air attaché in Bonn. He worked hard at reconciliation with the people he had once bombed and was a trustee of the Dresden Trust, which contributed to the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, destroyed in the 1945 attack.

  Virtually everyone in Bomber Command had been convinced of the justice of what they were doing while they were doing it. ‘I didn’t have any feelings of guilt,’ Bill Farquharson said, sixty-one years after flying his last mission. ‘As Harris said, you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. We were trying to save our country from Nazi Germany … my generation loved this country. We loved our way of life and we were going to keep it and fight for it … The majority of us felt that way.’5

  Viewed from a Lancaster the moral perspective was clear. ‘War is a brutal business,’ said Tony Iveson. ‘Civilization breaks down and if you’re going to win, you [have to] win any way you can. Otherwise you’re defeated.’6 It was an attitude that was shared by those who were facing them. The Luftwaffe night-fighter pilot Peter Spoden felt no animosity towards those he was up against. ‘We thought “we are not trying to kill the aircrew. We are trying to get the bombers who are destroying our town”… every soldier has to do his duty … it was our duty to shoot them down. It was their duty to bomb the towns.’7 The passage of time did little to change minds. ‘I always stuck up for Bomber Command,’ said Reg Fayers in December 2006. ‘We did a good job and I was never ashamed of anything we did.’8 Leonard Cheshire supported CND. But he was there at the unveiling of Bomber Harris’s statue outside St Clement Danes and when he was awarded a peerage he chose to remember Woodhall, the home of 617 Squadron, in his title.

  As the years passed and death got closer many felt the pull of the rare intimacy of their wartime lives and sought out their old comrades. They met again in pubs in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and Suffolk and drove out to look at their bases, many all but unrecognizable save for an old Nissen hut or a derelict watchtower. The dead were never far away and the need to commemorate them was strong. In Britain there is no public day to mark their sacrifice. But many of the dead airmen shot down over France, Belgium, Holland and Norway are still remembered on the anniversary of their deaths by local communities who regard them as liberators and heroes. In September 2006, the small town of Werkendam gave a fitting burial to the crew of a 78 Squadron Halifax that was shot down by a night-fighter and crashed into marshy ground on the night of 24/25 May 1944. The town council raised £85,000 towards the cost of retrieving their remains and raising the headstones. The councillor who led the campaign, Gerard Paans, declared ‘we owe our freedom to these brave airmen’.9

  The Bomber Boys conducted their own rituals of remembrance and raised their own modest memorials. A plaque in Tuddenham parish church in Suffolk commemorates a crew who died flying from the base, which has now melted back into the fields. There are only seven names on it. But the inscription could serve for all the dead Bomber Boys.

  Went the day well?

  We died and never knew.

  But well or ill, Freedom,

  We died for you.10

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  1 Interview with author.

  2 W. R. Chorley, Bomber Command Losses of the Second World War. 1939–40, Midland Publishing, 2005.

  3 ibid, 1945.

  4 Jorg Friedrich, The Fire, The Bombing of Germany 1940–45, Columbia University Press, 2006.

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Quoted in Denis Richards, Portal of Hungerford, Heinemann 1979, pp. 294–5.

  2 Peter Johnson, The Withered Garland, New European Publications 1995, pp. 262–3.

  3 George F. Kennan, Sketches from a Life, W. W. Norton, 2000, p. 121.

  4 Harris, IWM, 000931/01.

  5 The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939–1945. Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit, Frank Cass 1998, p. 68. The lowest civilian casualty is cited in the survey. The highest is given in Paul Johnson, Modern Times, 1983.

  6 Interview with author.

  7 Lobban, IWM, 88/31/1.

  8 Don Charlwood, No Moon Tonight, Goodall 2000, p. 131.

  9 Harris, Introduction to Guy Gibson, Enemy Coast Ahead – UNCENSORED, Crécy 2003, p. 10.

  10 James Hampton, Selected for Aircrew, Air Research Publications, p. 343.

  11 Harry Yates, Luck and a Lancaster, Airlife Classic 2001, p. 211.

  12 Fayers, Microfilm copy of letters and diaries. IWM.

  ONE

  1 Guy Gibson, op cit, pp. 34–8.

  2 The Earl of Halsbury, 1944, Thornton Butterworth, London 1926, p. 94.

  3 In the preface he cites a tract by J. B. S. Haldane, a prominent left-wing academic, to support his predictions. In Callinicus, published a year previously, Haldane had also dwelt on the subject of poison gas, an understandable preoccupation with someone who had suffered its effects in the trenches. Unlike Halsbury he suggested some counter-measures to avert the coming catastrophe. In the case of mustard gas, he wrote, ‘the American army made a systematic examination of the susceptibility of large numbers of recruits. They found that there was a very resistant class, comprising 20% of the white men tried but no less than 80% of the negroes. This is intelligible as the symptoms of mustard gas blistering and sunburn are very similar, and negroes are pretty well immune to sunburn. It looks, therefore, as if, after a stringent preliminary test, it should be possible to obtain coloured troops who would all be resistant to mustard gas concentrations harmful to most white men. Enough resistant whites are available to officer them.’

  4 Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, London 1950, pp. 12–14, 41.

  5 Sir John Slessor, The Central Blue, Cassell 1956, p. 56.

  6 Recounted to Henrietta Miers by Archie Bevan.

  7 Letter from Mönchengladbach City Archivist Dr Christian Wolfsburger, 12.9.2006.

  8 Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, HMSO 1961, vol. I, p. 150.

  9 Webster and Frankland, vol. I, p. 47.

  10 Webster and Frankland, vol. IV, p. 89.

  11 Webster and Frankland, vol. I, p. 154.

  12 ibid, vol. I, p. 154.

  TWO

  1 Memoir of D. R. Field, IWM Department of Documents, 92/29/1.

  2 Tim Lewis, Moonlight Sonata, the Coventry Blitz, 14/15 November 1940, Tim Lewis and Coventry City Council, pp. 57–61.

  3 ibid, p. 63.

  4 ibid, p. 82.

  5 Kris and Speier, German Radio Propaganda, p. 332.

  6 John Sheldon, A Night in Little Park Street, Britannicus Liber 1950.

  7 Norman Longmate, Air Raid, Arrow 1976, p. 106.

  8 Lewis, op cit, p. 128.

  9 Longmate, op cit, p. 63.

  10 ibid, p. 213.

  11 Mass Observation Archive, Sussex University, 6/4/E.

  12 ibid.

  13 ibid.

  14 The Observer, 17.11.40.

  15 Lewis, op cit, p. 57.

  16 MO Archive.

  THREE

  1 Johnson, op cit, p. 23.

  2 IWM sound archive, 8204/03/01.

  3 A. R. Taylor, unpublished memoir, IWM Department of Documents.

  4 Public Record Office, AIR 29/603.

  5 Yates, op cit, p. 15.

  6 Brian Frow, unpublished memoir, RAF Museum.

  7 Kenneth Jack Newman, unpublished memoir, IWM documents, 06/12/1.

  8 IWM, 92/29/1.

  9 IWM sound archive, 20926.

  10 IWM sound archive, 008901/16.

  11 Johnson, op cit, p. 12.

  12 IWM, 06/12/1.

  13 Ken Goodchild, unpublished memoir, IWM, 98/31/1.

  14 Richard Morris, Cheshire, Viking 2000, p. 22.

/>   15 Gibson, op cit, pp. 28–30.

  16 Interview with author.

  17 Interview with author.

  18 Bruce Lewis, Aircrew, Cassell 2003, p. 117.

  19 Interview with author.

  20 IWM sound archive, 007372.

  21 IWM, 06/12/1.

  22 IWM, 94/37/1.

  23 Morris, op cit, p. 32.

  24 Ralph Wood, ‘Seven is My Lucky Number’, unpublished manuscript, RAF Museum.

  25 Charlwood, op cit, p. 25.

  26 ibid, p. 7.

  FOUR

  1 Webster and Frankland, op cit, vol. IV, p. 30.

  2 Interview with author.

  3 IWM, 92/29/1.

  4 Yates, op cit, p. 59.

  5 Denis Steiner, unpublished memoir, IWM, 92/79/1.

  6 Hampton, op cit, p. 122.

  7 Frow, op cit.

  8 Cyril March, unpublished memoir, IWM, 67/281/1.

  9 Bruce Lewis, op cit, p. 118.

  10 Wood, op cit.

  11 Henry Hughes, unpublished memoir, IWM, 99/64/1.

  12 Denholm Elliott, recorded reminiscences, IWM, 98/7/1.

  13 Interview with author.

  14 Charlwood, op cit, p. 17.

  15 Interview with author.

  16 IWM sound archive, 11587/114.

  17 IWM sound archive, 20914/3.

  18 Jack Currie, Lancaster Target, Goodall 2004, pp. 9–10.

  19 Yates, op cit, p. 66.

  20 IWM sound archive, 2897/03.

  21 IWM sound archive, 20917.