Bob Johnson, Gabby Gabreski and the men of the 56th finally flew again on Wednesday, 3 November, to support a maximum-effort raid on Wilhelmshaven, Germany’s major North Sea port. Before taking off, they were joined by the 4th Fighter Group from Debden, who were to use Halesworth as a staging post. After refuelling, the 4th took off again ahead. Johnson was watching from his cockpit on the perimeter near the far end of the main runway when one of the 4th’s pilots, Lieutenant Waterman, got airborne only to spin and crash back down again, the plane flipping over in flames. Before the crash wagons – the fire service – could reach him, one of the airfield’s military policemen, a large fellow called Delaney, ran over to the burning wreckage and pulled Waterman free.
The pilot was hysterical. ‘Go away!’2 he shouted. ‘Let me die! Let me die!’ Johnson could see he had suffered bad burns and his clothing was still smoking. Ignoring Waterman’s pleas, Delaney pulled him clear then fell on him to protect him just as the Thunderbolt exploded in a ball of flame. Such accidents could happen to anyone, and Johnson, like everyone else, had to put it behind him and get on with the mission.
Major David Schilling led both groups that day – a total of fifty-four P-47s, the largest number ever put up for a mission from Halesworth. After the drama of taking off, the operation itself proved easy. The entire mission flew at high altitude, Johnson looking down at the many streaks of white from the contrails of 539 B-17s and B-24s. They saw nothing all the way to their target, but on the return leg Johnson spotted a lone Me109 away to his left and below, working its way up behind the bombers using the contrails to hide its sneaking approach. But the German pilot failed to spot Johnson’s Thunderbolt. As Johnson dived down he saw two rockets slung on to the underside of the German fighter: while deadly for a bomber, they made the Messerschmitt slow and ungainly, easy meat for an attacker. ‘Two hundred yards back,’ noted Johnson, ‘I squeezed the trigger; white flashes all over the airplane.3 The Kraut snapped over in a roll to the left and started to dive.’ It was no contest, not against the fast-diving P-47. Johnson tore down after him and got so close he almost rammed the enemy fighter. A squeeze of the trigger and this time the Messerschmitt – and pilot – blew up, Johnson hurtling through the remains.
Since their attack on Kassel on the night of 22/23 October, RAF Bomber Command had been grounded by the weather too, but that night, 3/4 November, they were to strike at Düsseldorf in Germany’s industrial heartland. Harris was continuing to pay scant regard to the POINTBLANK directive and instead was gearing up to strike Berlin itself.
In attacking the capital of the Reich, Harris did have the backing of the Prime Minister, who, while fully supportive of POINTBLANK, none the less believed that heavy night bombing might well gain the Allies the best results. On that same day, 3 November, Harris had written to Churchill for blessing for his renewed assault on Berlin and reported that forty-seven German cities had so far been targeted by his command. Nineteen, he told Churchill, were now virtually destroyed, another nineteen were seriously damaged and nine merely damaged. As Harris pointed out, nearly all this destruction had happened since the advent of a much larger heavy bomber force, as well as tools such as Oboe, H2S, Window and the Pathfinders. He urged the Prime Minister to put pressure on the Americans to give up costly, and in his view inefficient, attacks on specific targets and join the RAF instead in striking at Berlin. ‘We have not got far to go,’ he told Churchill, ‘but we must get the USAAF to wade in in greater force.4 We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost us 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’
Harris was again singularly failing to acknowledge or accept that winning air superiority and successful area bombing were not different strategies; rather, they needed to be symbiotic parts of the same overall plan.
In any case, night-time bombing was proving hardly much safer than daylight bombing, not least because numbers of Luftwaffe night-fighters were on the rise. There had been 553 night-fighters defending the Reich in January 1943, but by November that figure had risen to 748.5 Of those, just under five hundred were ready to fly at any moment. That equated to around the same number of day-fighters with which the RAF had defeated over a thousand Luftwaffe bombers back in 1940. At the start of November 1943, Harris had 879 bombers of all types available, which was also comparable with Luftwaffe bomber numbers of three summers earlier.
One of those flying into the darkness every time the ‘Tommies’ came over was Leutnant Wilhelm Johnen, of 5/Nachtjagdgeschwader 5, who had just turned twenty-two but who had already been flying in a front-line squadron for more than two years. From Homberg, south of Kassel in central Germany, he had decided to join what had then been the fledgling night-fighter arm in the autumn of 1940. At the time, he had still been training at fighter school in Munich when Major Wolfgang Falck, one of the first of the Luftwaffe’s night-fighters and the first successfully to shoot down an enemy aircraft, had arrived at the school on a recruitment drive. ‘Major Falck was a genial and plausible speaker,’ wrote Johnen later.6 ‘I trusted him and after due consideration I decided to become a night fighter.’
After completing his training, he had been posted to 3/NJG1 and since then had become a night-fighter ace with eight victories to his name. His first downed bomber had very nearly cost him his life, because on the same sortie he had then spotted a Stirling heavy bomber but had been shot at in turn. His navigator-gunner had been killed, his Me110 had become a flaming torch, and Johnen had only just managed to bail out in time, although not before being hit in the leg and badly burned. That had been in March 1942, and although these injuries had kept him out for several months, he had been back into the fray by June that year and barely out of it since. For the increasingly manpower-starved Wehrmacht, pilots had to fly and fly until they were physically unable to do so. All too often that meant death.
By the autumn of 1943, Johnen and his comrades in NJG5 had accepted this with a mounting sense of fatalism. They understood the Luftwaffe was in decline. On one occasion in the summer, a number of bombers had staged at their airfield of Gilze in Holland. Johnen and his fellows had watched them, discussing how the once mighty bomber formations were a shadow of what they had been. ‘In the old days,’ said one of his longest-serving comrades, Heini Strüning, ‘they set out in armadas of between 400 and 600 aircraft and today there are only about 100 of them left.7 Moreover, those old crates are out of date and an easy prey for the British night-fighters. If thirty of them set out tonight, probably only twenty would return.’ This underlined the futility of Hitler’s insistence on continued offensive action.
Johnen was aware of the new jet aircraft in development and he and his fellows all wondered why they were not getting these sooner. Enemy-aircraft envy was rife and they had all been demanding aircraft of greater speed, armament and range on a regular basis. For the night-fighters, the De Havilland Mosquito had caused the biggest stir. They considered the Mosquito ‘vastly superior’8 to their own night-fighters, which, in terms of speed and altitude, it was. The new Heinkel 219, which was just reaching the squadrons, offered some cause for hope, but once again its development had been fraught with setbacks, arguments between Kammhuber and Heinkel, and production difficulties as a result of Allied bombing.
Despite this, Johnen and the other night-fighters were still flying aircraft that were faster and far better armed than any British heavy bomber. Johnen’s was the Me110, a G-4 night-fighter variant, albeit slower than the Me110s in which he had first flown. And as with the British and Americans, new technology was never far away. His aircraft was now equipped with the latest on-board radar, the SN2, which was a development of the Lichtenstein. Its advantage lay in using several ultra-short waves so that it could change frequency should one of them get jammed; this enabled it to overcome Window, for example. The flipside was antennae that were even larger and more drag-inducing than the Lichtenstein’s; also, highly sensitive fingers and a great deal of practice were required in order
to get an enemy bomber clearly on the screen of this new instrument.
New tactical developments included the Zahme Sau system. By the beginning of November, both the SN2 and Tame Boar methods were being widely used. This way, as soon as an enemy raid was picked up and the estimated course and target of the bomber stream established, the night-fighter squadrons would be scrambled and directed towards it by ground controllers using another new VHF radio navigation system called ‘Ypsilon’, or ‘Y’, and also by providing night-fighter crews with updated radio commentary in plain language on the bombers’ position, course and height. The night-fighters would then become part of the bomber stream as soon as possible, usually flying below so that enemy bombers might be silhouetted against the sky and their own aircraft hidden by the dark of the ground.
The new Zahme Sau system had prompted Johnen’s boss at NJG5, Major Rudi Schönert, to introduce a new method of mounting twin 20mm cannons into the fuselage just behind the pilot’s head. With the barrels pointing upwards at an angle of around 70 degrees, the idea was to use the SN2 to latch on to an enemy bomber, then fly underneath it, where both Lancasters and Halifaxes were most vulnerable and least able to see any attacker. Using a reflector gunsight mounted in the top of the cockpit cover, the pilot would then open fire with both barrels, aiming high-explosive cannon shells directly into the fuel tanks. Schönert nicknamed this new system Schräge Musik – ‘slanting music’.
Johnen had used these new techniques to good effect when Bomber Command had attacked Berlin at the end of August in what had been a one-off raid by over seven hundred bombers. On this occasion, his SN2 set had packed up, but it hadn’t mattered. ‘Here over Berlin,’ he noted, ‘radar was superfluous.9 We could see the enemy circling over the city with our naked eyes.’ Just after 1 a.m., a Halifax had crossed his path and Johnen had fired directly into the bomber’s petrol tanks. The bomber exploded and fell in burning fragments. Not five minutes later, he had spotted a Stirling, quickly silenced the rear gunner and seconds later had destroyed the plane. ‘At 1.08 this heavy bomber fell like a stone out of the sky,’ he wrote, ‘and exploded on the ground.’10 That night, NJG5 had accounted for no fewer than twenty enemy bombers; Bomber Command lost fifty-six in all, almost as many as the Americans had suffered over Schweinfurt.
‘We all knew,’ noted Johnen, ‘that the hour of victory had passed and that Hitler only wanted to gain time.11 But was there any sense in brooding over this?’
Johnen was not alone in thinking like this, but on the night of 3 November 1943, as the bomber stream headed to Düsseldorf, he and his fellow night-fighter crews – more than five hundred of them – would be there in the skies over the Reich, using their cannons and Schräge Musik and on-board radar, and supported by what had become a highly sophisticated early-warning and ground control system. While the glory days of the Luftwaffe were in the past, it was also true that those in Bomber Command had very good reason to fear the night-fighters. In November 1943 they still posed a considerable – and increasingly sophisticated and efficient – threat.
RAF Leeming was a bleak place to be that autumn. Lying on a long stretch of flat land sandwiched between the high hills of the Yorkshire Dales to the west and the Yorkshire Moors to the east, with the town of Darlington to the north, and Thirsk and then, further off, York to the south, it was a place where the icy northerly winds from the Arctic swept in and where low cloud seemed to stay rooted. Bob Johnson might have thought the perpetual fog and cloud was bad enough far to the south in Suffolk, but compared with Leeming it was almost tropical.
The Byers twins, laid-back and phlegmatic, took the weather in their stride – after all, they were used to snow and cold in Canada – but Leeming looked particularly spectral that morning of Wednesday, 3 November, the hangars and buildings, not to mention the Halifaxes parked up around the perimeter, little more than dark looming shapes amid the mist and drizzle. Yet shortly after 10 a.m., a cipher clerk received a signal from Bomber Command Headquarters at High Wycombe that there would be an operation that night. A WAAF immediately put a call through to Wing Commander Jack Pattison, the CO of 429 Squadron. ‘There’s a “war” on tonight, sir,’ she told him.12 A short while after, Pattison was in the operations room.
Pattison was handed the fully decoded message in silence. Düsseldorf, and another maximum effort. The city had been designated by Harris as a ‘Primary Industrial Target’ – although it had little specifically to do with the Luftwaffe – but it had been attacked only four times so far. Bomber Command were demanding six hundred bombers for the attack. Pattison had fifteen aircraft available to fly, including his own.
A bomber squadron was split into three flights, which had an establishment of six aircraft each, of which was usually commanded by a squadron leader. George Byers had been put in ‘A’ Flight, his brother Bill in ‘B’. They headed to their respective flight rooms at around 10.30 a.m., where they learned, via a notice on the ops board, that they would both be flying operationally that evening. Of the target, there was no mention. Bill then went to see the meteorological officer to find out whether there was likely to be any improvement in the weather – there was not – and then, having assembled his crew, they took a truck, or ‘blood wagon’ as it was known, over to their Halifax, Z for Zebra.
The Halifax was a big bomber – at over 100 feet wide, 20 feet off the ground and nearly 72 feet in length, it sat on the concrete hardstand – parking area – with its all-black underside like a giant menacing beast. In its vast bomb bays it could carry nearly 6 tons of ordnance – not as much as a Lancaster but more than the American heavies – but while its payload more than matched its deadly appearance, it was horribly vulnerable, as all the British bombers were, to enemy attack. In order to carry that load and to cruise at over 220 m.p.h., it was very thin-skinned. Halifaxes were little more than tin cans, more cramped than their outward appearance suggested, with few concessions to the comfort of the crews. As they were unpressurized, at altitude the crews existed on oxygen and thick, electrically warmed sheepskins. To reach the cockpit, the pilot had to clamber over wing spars and, once seated, was aware that little other than a thin wall of aluminium protected him from tearing cannon shells, bullets and fire. On board, their only defence was eight .303 Browning machine guns, the same as a Spitfire or Hurricane from the Battle of Britain. They were little more than pea-shooters.
George Byers and his crew were doing the same – pre-flight checks and running up the engines – as was everyone else due to be flying later, so that, despite the cold, mist and drizzle, the whole airfield was a hive of activity. Soon the comparative quiet was ripped apart by the sound of sixty Merlin XX engines, while Jeeps, fuel bowsers and ammunition carts also sped around the field. Getting fifteen Halifax IIs ready for ops was no small operation in itself.
Lunch followed the pre-flight tests – a hot meal of stew, then chocolate or biscuits. The food was a small perk of the job; while the rest of the country was on reasonably stringent rationing by 1943, the bomber boys had no shortage of food or even drink; beer and whisky were plentiful in the mess. Between the end of lunch and the final briefing there was little time – perhaps the chance to write a letter or a quick game of cards – but by 3 p.m. they needed to be ready in their flight kit. In the flight rooms the crews would put on silk underwear, thick pullovers underneath the dark blue battledress, then wool-lined leather flying boots, then they would head to the briefing room. The briefing was for 429 Squadron and 427 ‘Lion’ Squadron, also based at Leeming. The pilots, navigators, flight engineers, bomb-aimers, wireless operators and air gunners would all pile into the briefing room, where rows of chairs and desks were already set up and where the aircrew could make notes. Ahead of them, on the far wall, was a large map, covered in cloth until the station commander and briefing staff arrived.
Waiting for the destination could be a tense moment: the further into Germany the target, the tougher the mission was likely to be, with more time over occupied territory, more
flak to contend with and, of course, more enemy night-fighters. So, it was to be Düsseldorf, on Germany’s western extreme. Plenty of flak, but there were worse targets. The navigation officer explained the forming-up procedure and the route of the bomber stream, which was marked on the map with tape. Next up was the met officer. Despite the persistent low cloud over England, the target area was expected to be clear. The Byers twins listened carefully, each jotting down a few notes on a scrap of paper.
With the briefing over, the crews collected the rest of their kit – flight suits, Irvin jackets, flak jackets and Mae West life vests – while Bill Byers squirrelled away some apple juice and chocolate. Then it was into the blood wagons once more to be taken around to their aircraft. It was nearly 4 p.m. by the time they reached their Halifaxes, and the light was already fading. Once aboard, they waited for nearly half an hour. In the cockpit, there were final checks with the flight engineers – Sergeant Jim Moore in Bill’s crew and Sergeant Ted Bates in George’s. It was cold without the engines running and smelled of metal and oil and rubber. The crews were quiet. No jokes, no laughter. Nicknames and Christian names were put to one side; proper titles only were used – Navigator, Mid-upper Gunner, Skipper – and communication was through the intercom and headphones. Time seemed to slow. Already, Bill Byers had learned this was the worst part of the whole trip. Too much time to think. He felt scared, as well he might. Anyone who said they didn’t feel the same was a liar as far as he was concerned.
At 4.20 p.m., the flare was fired and they all began to move off, slowly creeping around the perimeter. At 4.25 p.m., Squadron Leader Alban Chipling and his crew began their take-off. Twenty minutes later, it was George Byers’ turn, two ahead of his brother. Along the edge of the airfield and away by the hangars and control tower were the usual collection of ground crew, WAAFs and staff come to see the station’s two squadrons go. At 4.48 p.m., Z for Zebra was at the head of the runway. Opening the throttles, Bill felt the engines roar and the Halifax surge down the runway. Then, with both hands, he pulled back on the control column and felt the Halifax lift from the ground, the perimeter hedge disappearing beneath them, and then they were climbing up, through cloud, into the dark mass of the sky beyond.
Big Week Page 14