So began two months of escape and evasion. All but one of the crew had successfully made it out of the aircraft. Carter had landed in Brittany, south-west of Carhaix, and was immediately picked up by the Resistance. Passed from one safe house to another, he and another of his crew, ‘Nap’ Barry, who had also bailed out but landed elsewhere, were due to be picked up from the coast by a British submarine, but the rendezvous failed and instead they were sent to Paris, where they were due to meet with Tommy Thomas. That failed too, so they returned to Brittany, where Carter fell in love with and became engaged to Janine Jouanjean, the sister of a local Resistance leader. Eventually, in early April, he managed to get away on a forty-foot Breton sardine boat and, despite a storm and heavy swell much of the way, safely reached Newlyn in Cornwall. Tommy Thomas, meanwhile, had reached Switzerland, where he was interned, while three others, including Nap Barry, got to Spain and eventually back to England. Only one of the crew had been caught. After a formal debriefing by MI9, by 27 April Carter was back at RAF Graveley.
Since then he had flown a further twenty-five operations with a new crew, including over Hamburg in July, had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and now, still aged only twenty, was one of the most experienced navigators in the squadron. It didn’t make the trip to Mannheim on the night of 18/19 November any easier, though – not with 40-knot winds, intense flak and plenty of night-fighters about.
Carter and his crew, skippered by Squadron Leader Julian Sale, were designated ‘visual markers’, rather than ‘supporters’ or ‘back-up’ who followed behind the initial markers. Their task was to drop flares on top of the target, which was primarily the Daimler-Benz factory. For once the sky was clear, with no cloud at all over the city. Having got them there, Carter handed over to the bomb-aimer for the bomb run – although they were not bombs but flares. This was always the worst moment: flying straight and level, flak bursting all around, and a terrible feeling of helpless vulnerability. The crew were silent, almost breathless.
‘Bomb doors open,’ came the voice of the bomb-aimer, who then called out for minor adjustments of course.5 Then, at 8.40 p.m., ‘Bombs gone,’ and they dropped their load from the comparatively low height of 10,000 feet: four lots of white flares and three batches of marker candles, which floated down in parachuted canisters then burst, spewing a cascade of a thousand marker candles each, falling pools of glowing light that caused a photographic flash as they triggered the camera. Then the pilot flung the plane into heavy evasive action, pushed the stick forward to gain speed and got away from the inferno as quickly as possible.
Also flying that mission were Bill Byers and his crew, on what was their first trip since the loss of George. The strong winds pushed them far off course and instead they hit Frankfurt, but made it back safely. It was unusual to fly two nights in a row, but they were back in the air again the following night – this time to Leverkusen, near Cologne. ‘I think if I had stopped,’ said Bill, ‘I might have broke down.’6
Berlin was hit again on the night of 22/23 November, this time by 764 aircraft, causing several firestorms due to the recent stretch of dry weather. The next day, the smoke cloud over the city reached 19,000 feet and could be seen for miles. Some 3,000 houses and 23 industrial plants were completely destroyed and many thousands more properties damaged. More than 175,000 people were left homeless and over 50,000 troops were brought in to help clear up the damage. It was on this night that the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was destroyed. So too were more than 2,000 people. Another 383 bombers returned the following night and 443 on the night of 26/27 November, both raids killing a further 2,000 and more. Harris was certainly hitting Berlin hard, but at a cost: between 18 and 27 November, Bomber Command lost 131 aircraft – and over 900 aircrew.
In his new offices near the Olympic Park in the west of Berlin, Hajo Herrmann was now not only Inspector of Night-fighters but also commander of the Wilde Sau 30 Jagddivision. Göring, like Hitler, favoured a divide-and-rule approach to leadership and, with it, lots of parallel command structures, which meant that although the Wilde Sau came under the jurisdiction of Beppo Schmid as CO of the Jagdkorps, Herrmann was subordinate not to him but rather to General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff, commander of the Central Area. In practical terms, this meant Herrmann had free rein and, if answerable to anyone, it was to Göring.
Suddenly, he was a colonel with his own staff and far-reaching responsibilities, with influence in areas of training, tactics and even procurement. To discuss matters of procurement and supply he had driven through Berlin to the giant Zoo Flakturm – flak tower – complex for a meeting with the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, on the evening of 22 November. Three of these monster edifices had been built in the capital, each enormous and utterly dominating the part of the city in which it stood. The main Zoo Flakturm – the ‘G-tower’ – was 135 feet high and over 200 feet wide, contained seven levels including a hospital, ammunition stores and offices, and had walls 8 feet thick. It could hold up to eight thousand civilians and the array of anti-aircraft guns on the roof were connected by underground cables to a smaller ‘L-tower’, which contained the radio and radar systems. It stood over the old zoological gardens like a massive concrete Norman keep.
Herrmann met Speer in the L-tower, which was the command and control post. During the meeting, the air-raid sirens sounded and, once he had finished his meeting with the Reichsminister, Herrmann hurried up to the roof of the tower where the Würzburg and Mannheim radars were situated along with the rangefinder. Young Luftwaffe soldiers were busy manning this sophisticated technology. Not far away, fallen incendiaries were stuck in the trees and burning on the pavements. ‘There was a shrill organ concert of thousands of flak splinters whistling down and striking sparks from the concrete as they landed,’ Herrmann noted, ‘punctuated by the cracking of bombs and the pressure waves of aerial mines.7 All around me was a light-grey to white luminous sea of fog. In the centre of this chaos the young men on their exposed tower carried out their duty. I was appalled. This was what the terror looked like to the eyes of a defenceless victim.’
Herrmann left and drove back to his headquarters at Staaken through burning streets. He felt utterly overwhelmed, his mind stunned and conflicted; he wasn’t sure whether there was any hope left. Should they now admit defeat? This was exactly what Harris had been bargaining on, but by the time he arrived Herrmann felt resolved to do more to take the fight to the enemy; the weather might be awful, but his Wilde Sau would have to brave it. They could not sit back and let this carnage happen in the city.
Bomber Command were back the next night, but the weather was terrible once more: the cloud base was at just 100 feet and it was treacherously cold. Herrmann agonized over whether to send his men up in such conditions, so instead asked for volunteers. Only those who felt confident enough should put themselves forward, he told them. Of the thirty pilots at Staaken, seven raised their hands. Herrmann followed them out; he was forbidden to fly – on Göring’s direct orders – so watched them from the control tower. The visibility had not improved. ‘It was cold and damp,’ he wrote, ‘and I found myself shivering again.8 But it wasn’t only because of the weather. I was asking myself where the war was taking us, and wondering whether we were asking too much of our airmen and of our civilian population.’
He waited up, cursing himself for having sent any of them out, but after several long, cold and dispiriting hours they all returned and landed safely. ‘I gave thanks to God,’ wrote Herrmann.9
New crews were arriving during the autumn of 1943 to bolster the Eighth’s bomber force, some flying over the Atlantic, others taking the long voyage by sea. Factories in the USA were building more and more bombers and fighter aircraft; American industry was operating at full speed, reaping the rewards of the conversion from civilian to war economy. At Willow Run, for example, what two years earlier had been a rather featureless creek east of Detroit was now the world’s largest single factory, more than a mile long. The brainchild of Char
les Sorensen, one of the Ford automobile company’s senior executives, it was an assembly-line building under licence Consolidated B-24 bombers. With no threat from any enemy bombers, it could afford to be the world’s largest room, and could operate round the clock and with maximum efficiency. Factories like this were helping the US build a staggering 8,574 heavy bombers in 1943 alone. Even so, Eaker was still receiving fewer than the 250 per month he had demanded.
Among the newcomers were Lieutenant Belford J. ‘BJ’ Keirsted and his B-17 crew, who arrived at Knettishall in Suffolk in October to join the 563rd Bomb Squadron of the 388th Bomb Group. The radio operator was 21-year-old Larry Goldstein, a New Yorker from Brooklyn. From a large Jewish family, Goldstein was the fourth child of six. Soon after Pearl Harbor, his older brother joined the Marines and Goldstein tried to follow suit, but was turned away. Instead, he joined the Air Corps and, to his delight, was sent straight to Miami Beach for basic training. Having always had an interest in aviation, from reading about aircraft to making models as a kid, he had dreamed of one day becoming a pilot, but instead was earmarked to become a radio operator and posted to a school in Chicago. Passing out in March 1943, he then went back to Florida to attend radar school in Boca Raton, and from there to a replacement depot at Salt Lake City, which was where he volunteered for flying status. ‘I was impressed with the glamour of flying,’ he said, ‘and all that went with it – the silver wings of the gunner, the promotions, and the flight pay.’10 Hustled off on to a gunnery course, he had no idea that plans were already afoot to create the largest air force in the world.
After gunnery school he was sent to a brand-new airfield at Moses Lake, Washington State, where he saw his first B-17 and was allocated a crew, with Keirsted as pilot and Clifford ‘Ace’ Conklin as co-pilot. ‘I must admit,’ Goldstein recalled, ‘that when I sat in my radio position of the B-17, I was overwhelmed in not knowing where I was, what I was supposed to do.’11 He had sat in mock-ups during training, but the reality seemed very different. This was hardly surprising. The B-17 looked solid and rugged from the outside, but on board it was a slightly different matter. The prime objective of wartime heavies was to drop bombs. On board, the Fortress, like other bombers, was little more than a tin can: cramped, difficult to move about in and a largely alien environment for new aircrew experiencing the plane for the first time. The entry hatch was about two-thirds of the way down the fuselage on the starboard – right-hand – side. Only the tail gunner turned left to his isolated position at the rear of the plane. The two waist gunners had the easiest route to their stations along a narrow wooden walkway, but the machine guns were open to the elements, with wooden ammunition boxes either side hooked to the aircraft’s sides. No part of the aircraft was pressurized and so at bombing heights the crew all had to operate with oxygen and at sub-zero temperatures. This meant they had to wear electric sheepskin flying suits that could all too often short-circuit with all the movement the crew had to carry out. Goldstein’s station as a radio man was better than some – he did at least have a small table and chair – but he could see little and it was incredibly noisy, and it took a bit of adjusting to be able to use his hands freely while wearing gloves in a heavily vibrating aircraft.
Then there was the ball-turret gunner, who had to squat into a hydraulically controlled ball that was fixed to the underside of the plane and had an entry and exit hatch that was, again, in no way generously proportioned. Wearing a parachute while in the ball turret was inconceivable and the position was a lonely and isolated one. Most tended to sit up in the fuselage until over enemy territory, but that could still mean spending several hours squashed into the turret.
Up front were the navigator, pilot, co-pilot and bombardier, who accessed the aircraft from a hatch on the lower port side of the cockpit. This stood quite high off the ground with no ladder, so the technique was to grip the sides, swing the legs upwards and then hoist oneself in. The four up front had reasonably comfortable seats, but the noise was incredible; communication without headsets and a fully functioning intercom was inconceivable. All around were a multitude of wires and electrics, any one of which might get damaged and cause problems. The truth was, young men were not really designed to fly in tight formation on oxygen in temperatures of up to minus 50° for hours on end and in rattling, noisy, cramped, largely comfortless conditions – and that was without being shot at or flying through dense flak. It was a feature of the war that, while technology and mechanization were taking a giant leap forward, much less thought had been given to those expected to operate these machines.
None the less, Goldstein soon got to grips with the demands of the job, helped by the immediate gelling of the crew, who nicknamed him ‘Goldie’. Like so many other aircrews, they were a mixed bunch and unlikely ever to have worn a military uniform had it not been for the war. BJ Keirsted, the pilot, had been a professional ballroom dancer with his sister, with the stage name ‘Jan and Janis’. Ace Conklin had been a business student and had initially been a bit sceptical about playing second fiddle to a dancer, but Keirsted soon proved a natural leader. ‘I’m not interested in your personal life,’ he told his new crew.12 ‘I’m only interested in what you can do for the crew. And I want every man to learn his position. Maybe in combat, one of us may save the lives of the other nine.’ Only the rear gunner, Bob Miller, seemed to be the odd one out. ‘Strange guy,’ wrote Goldstein in his diary. ‘A loner, never seemed to hang out with us as a crew.’13 Miller aside, by the time they had finished working up together and were finally posted overseas in early October, they were not only firm buddies but also trusted one another implicitly.
Goldstein hated the five-day crossing aboard the Queen Mary – the constant zig-zagging to avoid U-boats, the cramped conditions and the terrible English food. He soon stopped eating the issued fare and lived off Hershey bars instead. They docked in Greenock and there followed a train ride, then a truck ride, until finally they were at Knettishall, just down the road from Thorpe Abbotts. It was another vast airfield, seemingly sprung up, as if by magic, over the past year: 50-yard-wide concrete runways, a 2,000-yard main runway, two T2-type hangars and a new airfield village hastily completed, with brick operations rooms, airfield headquarters, mess quarters and accommodation blocks. American war production was impressive, but so too were the speed and efficiency with which British construction firms were laying down huge numbers of new airfields. The 388th BG had been there since June, but for new crews like Keirsted’s it seemed as though the bomb group had been there for ever.
A stark reminder of what faced them now they were in England and on the bomber front line occurred the night they arrived. Larry Goldstein, along with the five other enlisted men in the crew, were shown their barracks – a Nissen hut, with six others already there and a number of empty beds. ‘Where are these guys?’14 one of them asked.
‘Oh, they all went down in the last few days.’ That was when Goldstein realized he had volunteered for this. He wondered why he hadn’t taken the trouble to find out a little bit more about it beforehand.
When they first met their new ground crew, BJ asked the crew chief how many crews he had had. ‘You’re my third,’ came the reply.15 ‘The other two went down.’ That was since June – just four months.
‘We will make it,’ Keirsted assured him. ‘You can mark that down.’
Mission No. 1 for the crew of Worry Wart – as they had named their ship – finally took place on Friday, 26 November. The target was Bremen, and it was the first time the Eighth had ventured into Germany for almost a fortnight. Goldie Goldstein and the rest of the crew were woken at 3.30 a.m., the world outside still pitch black. Trucks came to collect them and take them to breakfast, which included fresh eggs rather than the powdered version. Then it was to the crew rooms to get their flying kit before heading to the briefing. ‘It was all very strange to me,’ Goldstein scrawled in his diary, ‘but will probably be into the swing of things soon.’16 From the briefing, they were taken by trucks to the
ir waiting Fortress. Take-off was 8 a.m. They climbed through the cloud and began the forming-up process. There were three bomb divisions in the Eighth, much like the groups of Bomber Command. Each flew in its own formation, and each bomb squadron flew in a formation with its bomb group. In all, 440 heavies were flying that morning on the Bremen trip, with five bomb groups contributing to the 3rd Division’s effort, of which the 388th from Knettishall was one. They sent up forty-one B-17s.
As bomber raids over Germany went, it was a comparatively quiet one. The crew of Worry Wart didn’t see any enemy fighters, although Goldstein found the flak uncomfortable. ‘The two most welcome expressions heard over the interphone are, “Bombs away,”’ he noted, ‘and “England just ahead.”’17 Twenty-five bombers were lost that day, including one from the 388th that collided with another Fortress and one that was hit by incendiaries dropped from a bomber above them.
Goldstein was absolutely exhausted by the time they landed safely back down again. It shocked him how tired he was. Five hours on oxygen hadn’t helped, he supposed. ‘I will have to work out a system of preparing for the missions,’ he wrote in his final entry that day.18 ‘Only 24 more to go.’
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