The poor weather and comparative lack of missions had, however, allowed Eaker both to build up strength and to give new crews time to acclimatize and carry out practice flights in conditions very different to those back home. This period of comparative recuperation for the Eighth may have frustrated General Arnold, but as a result the raid on Bremen on 13 December had involved over 700 bombers and nearly 400 fighters, while the next trip to the city, on 16 December, had been carried out by 631 bombers and 201 fighters, and similar numbers struck again on 20 December. Then had come Osnabrück and Münster again on the 22nd, a milk run to Calais on Christmas Eve and another big effort of over 700 bombers and nearly 600 fighters to Ludwigshafen on 30 December.
New boys like Captain Jimmy Stewart and Sergeant Robbie Robinson had chalked up their first missions, along with the rest of the 445th. ‘We were all terrified,’ Stewart later admitted.2 But they managed to get through them. So too did Larry Goldstein and his crew on Worry Wart, while Hugh McGinty had his fifth mission under his belt by the end of the year and Bob Hughes, up at the 100th BG at Thorpe Abbotts, had managed to complete his seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth missions.
Meanwhile, RAF Bomber Command had continued to pummel Berlin – four times in December alone. The capital wasn’t the only target, however; on the night of 20 December, Harris sent 650 bombers to Frankfurt, including the Pathfinders of 35 Squadron. Excellent visibility had been predicted, but when they reached Frankfurt there was thick cloud and they had decided against releasing their target indicators after making four unsuccessful runs at the dangerously low height of 5,000 feet. After dropping their three 1,000lb bombs on what looked like a factory, they had turned for home.
This was Gordon Carter’s forty-sixth mission, one more than the normal tour of duty in the Pathfinder Force, but he was conscious ‘keen types’ tended to press on to sixty and he wanted to reach that magic number. In any case, he had become very good friends with his skipper, Julian Sale, and liked the rest of the crew; he wanted to stick with them. What’s more, a few weeks earlier he had been to Buckingham Palace to receive a Distinguished Flying Cross from the King himself and on 7 December had been given temporary promotion to squadron leader.
The return leg was uneventful until Sale brought the Lancaster down to 1,200 feet and then suddenly all hell let loose as flares started lighting from the bomb bay. Somehow, the safety cover for a TI fuse had detached itself and now that they were below the flares’ normal detonating height they had gone off. All too rapidly, the bomber began to fill with smoke and flames. Sale gave the order to bail out, which Carter, not for the first time, did right away. One moment he was upside down, then he righted himself, his parachute opened and he hit the ground heavily – and just beyond the perimeter track at Graveley.
Meanwhile, Sale had also been about to jump when he became aware of Roger ‘Sheep’ Lamb, the mid-upper gunner, beside him. Lamb’s parachute was burned and, realizing that meant certain death for one of his crew, Sale opened the side window and, with his head half out so he could see, succeeded in bringing the Halifax around and landing it. As soon as they had taxied off the runway and on to the grass, he and Lamb jumped down and ran for their lives. They managed to cover just enough distance before the entire Halifax blew up. For his actions, Sale was awarded a Bar to his Distinguished Service Order. An article in The Times ran the headline, ‘Landed Blazing Bomber to Save Comrade’.3
The next trip after Frankfurt had been, once again, Berlin. Among those being sent to the capital of the Reich was pilot Flight Sergeant Russell ‘Rusty’ Waughman and his crew, who had joined 101 Squadron in Bomber Command’s 5 Group only in November. It had been their misfortune to be thrown straight into one of the furthest and best-defended targets in Germany; there had been no milk run to help ease them into operational flying. Nor had their first two trips gone at all well.
Waughman was only twenty years old and from Consett in County Durham. From a working-class background, he had been a sickly child, suffering from typhoid among other illnesses, and had missed a lot of his schooling. Somehow he had survived and when he was seventeen decided to volunteer for the navy as his father had done. However, when he realized the local naval recruiting officer was his own doctor, he went next door to the RAF recruitment office instead. Incredibly, he was accepted, even though during his medical he was told he had a heart murmur. Then he was packed off to the Air Crew Receiving Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London; it was the furthest he had ever been from home by quite some margin.
That he might be earmarked for pilot training had never occurred to Waughman, but, despite his childhood hindrances, he passed all attestation, progressive and aptitude tests and to his utter amazement was soon after sent to Canada to learn to fly. Like most others, he requested to be a fighter pilot, but instead he was trained as a bomber pilot. Almost thrown out at one point, he survived his washout test and got his wings, and by the beginning of 1943 was heading back across the Atlantic to Britain. He passed through his Operational Training Unit, the Heavy Conversion Unit where he learned to fly four-engine Halifaxes instead of twin-engine Wellingtons, and then finally Lancaster Finishing School.
He found it a little tricky to fly the Lancaster to start with. ‘My little short legs came into it,’ he said.4 ‘When you’re on take-off and you’ve got four engines with 1280 horsepower and 3000 revs, and all the props going, you’ve got tremendous torque, and with my little short legs I couldn’t keep this bloody thing going straight down the runway.’ His great friend throughout training, Paul Zankey, was much taller and had no problem, so finished his training a bit sooner and was sent to join 101 Squadron. When Waughman had finally got the measure of the Lancaster and had finished his training, he asked to join 101 Squadron too. At first he was told only the best pilots were sent there, but in the end that was where he went. ‘So I asked him, “Why the change of heart?”5 and he told me it was the squadron with the highest attrition rate in the service and they had first call on the availability of crew.’
As if to prove the point, when he and his crew reached 101 Squadron at the end of November, Waughman learned that his great pal Zankey had been killed the night before on his first mission.
The squadron’s home was Ludford Magna, just north of Lincoln. A number of 5 Group bomber stations were scattered around the city, including Scampton, from where the Dams’ Raid had been launched back in May, as well as Waddington and Coningsby. Ludford Magna was a little rough around the edges, built in ninety days from scratch and only ever meant to be a temporary base. There was only one main tarmacked road on to the base. The men had renamed the place ‘Mudford’. The days were dark, the rain, cloud and mist seemingly never-ending, but at least those running the base had a fairly relaxed attitude about what the aircrew got up to when not flying. There was plenty of beer in the mess, trips into Lincoln, and a laissez-faire approach to the men finding ‘relaxation’ with women. This was all quite an eye-opener for Waughman, who had lived a decidedly sheltered life and was hardly worldly-wise. He learned that around one in five of his comrades had some form of sexually transmitted disease. ‘It wasn’t treated as pornography,’ he said, ‘it was just a sense of relaxation.’6 One friend later said to him, ‘Thank God for sex. It’s kept me sane.’
Waughman and his crew had been put in C Flight and, unlike Paul Zankey, were given over three weeks in which to train further through cross-country navigational flights, fighter affiliation flights and practice bomb-drop runs over the training site at Wainfleet on The Wash. Not until 23 December were they put on the roster for their first mission. As with the Americans, the British system was to send a new pilot up as second pilot with an experienced crew for his first mission, but Berlin was a maximum effort, so Waughman had to forgo that opportunity to gain much-needed experience. They would just have to trust their training, trust each other, and hope for the best.
Up to that point, Waughman had been really pleased with his crew. They were all NCOs, so were
able to keep together when not flying, rather than heading off to separate digs and messes. Crewing up at the Operational Training Unit was always a haphazard affair, but they were all young, reasonably like-minded and most instinctively understood that by cooperating and getting on they were more likely to succeed and get through their tour. Wartime camaraderie was intense and helped forge firm friendships. Waughman warmed to them quickly, even though they were all quite different in background and character. Norman Westby, his bomb-aimer, had been born in a gypsy caravan. His navigator, Alec Cowan, had lied about his age to get in and was only seventeen, not that Waughman knew this at the time. His wireless operator was a Welshman inevitably nicknamed ‘Taffy’. He liked his beer, but Waughman never doubted his skill or reliability. ‘He was a rogue,’ said Waughman, ‘an amazing character.7 But very conscientious.’
The only member of the crew he had concerns over was his engineer, Les Reeves, and on that first trip, having successfully taken off and climbed up above the cloud, they were crossing the Channel when Reeves told Waughman their instruments were defective and that the GEE was not working. They should turn back, Reeves told him. Waughman felt he had to listen to his flight engineer; flying all the way to Berlin was a big task at any time, but on a first operation, and with defective navigational gear and faulty instruments, the odds seemed insurmountable. And so Waughman turned for home. And an aborted mission did not count on their tally of thirty for a first tour.
Christmas Day was spent on standby for an operation that was then scrubbed, so it wasn’t until Wednesday, 29 December, that they flew off again for Berlin. Again, Reeves claimed that some of the Lancaster’s instruments were defective, but this time they flew on. ‘Target pretty hot,’ noted Waughman in his diary.8 They encountered both fighters and flak over Berlin, shells bursting all around them during the bomb run and then were twice attacked over the target by Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Sau and once again on the return leg. Each time, Waughman managed to take evasive action and the fighters disengaged to attack another aircraft instead, and somehow, after seven and a quarter hours in the air, they managed to make it back in one piece.
By this time, Waughman was starting to have doubts about his engineer, who seemed a little jumpy, but inexperience got the better of him and so he did nothing about it. On the evening of Saturday, 1 January 1944, the target was once again Berlin, and they were one of 421 Lancasters sent off on this first day of the new year. As they crossed the Dutch coast, however, they were hit by flak and the starboard out engine caught fire. At this Reeves panicked. ‘He just sat on the floor,’ said Waughman, ‘and shivered and sweated and cried.’9 By a combination of diving and using the inbuilt extinguisher, they managed to get the fire out, but Reeves reckoned there was an oil leak. Lancasters were perfectly capable of flying on three engines and, as Waughman admitted, with a bit more experience he might have continued to the target even with one engine down. However, with Reeves in such a state he felt he had no option but to turn back. They then got hopelessly lost.
Eventually, they made it back, but Waughman was hauled in before the CO. Two aborted missions out of three was not a good record, and his crew had got badly lost. ‘You know, we can’t have this sort of thing going on,’ the squadron commander told him.10 ‘Any more of this sort of thing and we’ll make you LMF and you’ll be posted off.’ ‘LMF’ stood for ‘lack of moral fibre’. Waughman was being threatened with being sacked for cowardice. However, it was not Waughman who was kicked out of the squadron for LMF, but Reeves. ‘He disappeared off the station,’ said Waughman. ‘He just left.’ Waughman discovered that their plane really had been defective; their G4 compass, so vital for navigation, had been going awry because steel links had been put into the control column. They had been flying on the right compass headings but in all the wrong directions. Fortunately, their ground crew explained this to the wing commander and Waughman was given both a new engineer and an exoneration.
That same evening, New Year’s Day 1944, Hajo Herrmann had seen the intelligence reports that the RAF was once more heading to Berlin. Although Göring had expressly grounded him, no one in the Wilde Sau had greater experience than him at flying at night in such appalling conditions. After watching his pilots take off into the icy cloud too many times for comfort, he decided that, along with his adjutant and Friedrich-Karl ‘Tutti’ Müller, a fighter ace just about to take over command of JG3, they would head out of Berlin to Staaken on the western edge of the city. There they picked up their FW190s and scrambled into the darkness. The cloud base was at 1,500 feet, better than it might have been, but it was freezing and there was a high risk of icing until they broke free of the cloud base, which would be at around 12,000 feet. Icing was dangerous, as it caught on the wings and the propeller, slowing the aircraft as it climbed and dramatically reducing the performance and bite of the prop, which could cause an aircraft to stall and simply drop out of the sky.
Herrmann and his fellows decided they should stay under the cloud until they had reached full throttle, then climb steeply and through the ice-zone as quickly as possible. The plan worked, and they broke out of the cloud without mishap. Herrmann then flew up to 21,000 feet, circling at low throttle until the enemy appeared.
Suddenly in his headphones he heard, ‘Leading bombers, Brandenburg.’ They were now close. Markers began dropping from the sky – red and green – followed by the back-up markers. The British Pathfinders were marking their target. Flak began to erupt, followed by their own illuminating flares, which was just what Herrmann needed. Now he saw a Lancaster heading towards him from the south. Opening the throttle, Herrmann dived down towards it, firing at the wings and cockpit. His aim was good and a large chunk of debris hurtled past him. It was 2.57 a.m. and he radioed that he had scored a probable, then turned back into the bright arena now over the city as flares and searchlights created a light glow that lit up the bombers amply. Below and about half a mile away he spotted another bomber silhouetted against the ‘shroud’ – the cloud illuminated by searchlights – and although momentarily dazzled by flares, he quickly regained his bead and opened fire again in two quick successive bursts. Flames erupted from the bomber, rapidly taking hold, and the Lancaster fell away. It was 3.05 a.m.
A loud crack resounded in Herrmann’s cockpit and he felt pain in his leg. Tracer shot past him: he had been hit by a British night-fighter. ‘I had become a victim of my own shroud,’ he noted, ‘the blazing bomber had made it even brighter.’11 Herrmann flew on and out of the glare. He had now lost all feeling in his leg, so was relieved to find it still there. When he called Staaken there was no response and he realized his radio had been shot up in the attack. Freezing air hurtled into the cockpit on to his face and neck. He could not land at night in these conditions without radio contact; he had a wound in his leg that was bleeding badly; and the temperature around him was 50° below. Herrmann was starting to feel faint. He knew he had to get out – and soon, before he passed out – but he was too high. A burst of oxygen made little difference. Pushing the stick forward, he dived down, desperately trying to keep himself going, then pulled out at around 800 feet, hoping he might see the lights of an airfield and so take his chances at landing, but there was nothing – just inky darkness and falling snow.
The time had come to bail out. Right leg up against his body, unbuckle the harness, oxygen leads pulled clear, jettison the canopy, push the stick forward, and suddenly he was free, falling through the sky. He pulled the ripcord and, with a lurch, the parachute blossomed and he was drifting down through the sleet. He landed with a painful thump and pulled the parachute towards him, thinking he would wrap himself up in it until dawn, but then he felt the blood in his boot and realized that might be too late. Crawling with his arms and one good leg, he soon spotted a house and made for it, calling out. A woman opened the door. Herrmann was flooded with relief. Within an hour he was recovering in the hospital at nearby Hagen. From his bed he had a message sent to his command post and a short while later he
was wheeled into the doctor’s office to take a call from Führer Headquarters. It was Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant on the phone. The Führer was sending his personal congratulations and asking him to report to him as soon as he was fit enough.
Within a couple of days, Herrmann’s old Wilde Sau friends had him transferred to a sanatorium near their base at Bonn–Endenich. ‘It was a great joy to my stressed, worn-out soul to have dear, friendly people coming to visit me,’ he noted.12 ‘There, there was no war. In my mind’s eye, I saw far-off, peaceful times, small things, fine things, brotherly love.’
Those German civilians still stuck in Berlin, however, enjoyed no respite. Margarete Dos had returned home to find the city in ruins. The colour seemed to have disappeared. Trees were shredded, skeletal shapes. Familiar buildings had collapsed. There was no birdsong, no children laughing. Rubble filled many of the streets. Half-collapsed buildings still held the remnants of the homes they had once been: a bathtub perched precariously, or a wall still papered but open to the elements. Giant potholes filled with water were a feature of almost every street.
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