Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Now, on a lovely summer evening, Frank and some friends were sailing their boats on the duck pond at Norton Green as people strolled round the garden, or sat about chatting – an idyllic scene.

  Suddenly we all became aware of a steady humming sound which got louder until it was a roar. There above us were bomber planes, masses of them, flying in a wide arc. The roaring got louder as more groups of planes arrived in blocks, one above the other. They flew in wide circles, seeming to be centred on the Green.

  All playing had stopped, the boats forgotten, as we stared at such a magnitude of four-engined bombers, by now deafening in their noise … The sky was now black with bombers blotting out the last rays of the sun, and the noise overhead had reached a crescendo. Suddenly they started to straighten out and head for the coast. As the last engine sound died away, it was quiet and tranquil once more.

  In the morning the boys learned that they had witnessed the start of Operation Millennium, the RAF’s first 1000-bomber raid, dispatched by Air Marshal Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris as a demonstration of strength soon after his own elevation to the summit of Bomber Command. The lads learned that forty-three of the aircraft they had seen did not return, and that a lot of the men were missing or dead; but for the time being they could have no conception of the devastation the raid had created.

  The original target had been Hamburg, but because of bad weather at the last minute the assault was diverted to Cologne: 1455 tons of bombs were dropped, causing havoc in the city on the Rhine. More than 3000 houses were destroyed, another 9000 more or less severely damaged. Some 45,000 people were left homeless, and nearly 500 were killed. The glorious Gothic cathedral, with its towering twin spires, miraculously escaped destruction – as it did for the whole of the war.

  RAF Bomber Command’s core territory was Lincolnshire, which became ‘to all intents and purposes, one enormous airfield, populated by around 300,000 civilians and 80,000 airmen and women’. At the peak of activity there were forty-six military airfields in the county, sixteen of them within a ten-mile radius of Lincoln itself, and the sky became so crowded that circuits overlapped. Besides the RAF stations, there were four bombing ranges on the coast, two on the Wash and two further north.

  The most famous of Lincolnshire squadrons, 617, was formed in March 1943 with the express purpose of destroying the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr. Only seven weeks after the unit’s inception, on the night of 16–17 May, Wing Commander Guy Gibson took off from Scampton and led a force of nineteen Lancasters to their targets deep in the heart of Germany. By brilliant, courageous flying, the crews breached the first two dams with a raid that won the participants thirty-three awards for gallantry, including the Victoria Cross for their leader; but eight of the bombers were lost, fifty-three out of 133 air crew were killed and three captured.

  Around the bomber bases in East Anglia, as well as in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, villagers lived in close proximity to the airmen, sometimes right on the perimeter of the field. On summer afternoons, when they saw RAF crews stretched out on the grass beneath their machines, catching up on sleep before the next night’s mission, the country folk sensed something of the courage, dedication and sheer endurance needed for every raid. Boys had special observation points from which they counted bombers taking off, and people of all ages waited anxiously for their return, knowing almost for sure that some would have been shot down. At Binbrook 460 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force established a particularly close bond with the people of the village – even though, when blond men with strange accents first appeared on the scene, one girl ran home and told her mother that the invasion had begun. Elsewhere farming families befriended WAAFs attached to the various stations and supplied them with fresh eggs.

  Relations were not always so harmonious. According to Max Hastings,

  Holme-on-Spalding Moor was a bleak, unfriendly sort of place. It was widely felt by the aircrew that the village had turned its back on the war. The locals resented the RAF’s domination of their bowling alley. Wives and girlfriends who lodged nearby were treated with ill-concealed disdain, scarlet women from the cities.

  The war brought work and money to East Anglia. Large numbers of airmen were billeted in private houses; thousands of civilian workmen supported the air bases, and pubs found trade hugely increased by airmen in search not only of a drink but also of company and conversation. Yet the airfields also greatly increased the danger for everyone living near them. With huge numbers of aircraft constantly taking off, flying and landing, crashes were inevitable: during the war more than 1000 planes came down in Lincolnshire alone, one (a Hampden bomber) onto Lincoln Girls’ High School, killing the four-man crew and the senior French mistress.

  Further north, Yorkshire also became densely populated with bomber bases. Several new airfields had been laid out during the 1930s, but the war set off a rapid expansion, and by 1945 the county contained no fewer than forty, most of them in the flat land along the River Ouse. Like East Anglia, the county became a virtual aircraft carrier. Thousands of acres of farmland were taken for new bases, and thousands of servicemen and women moved into what had been empty countryside. Some of the airfields, like Church Fenton, between Selby and Tadcaster, were fighter stations, charged with the task of defending the east coast, and had grass runways; others – among them Leeming, south of Catterick – began as fighter bases but converted to bombers. Between 1940 and 1945 the RAF flew more than 100,000 sorties from Yorkshire fields and lost over 18,000 men.

  Lying not far inland, the bases were vulnerable to sudden attacks, and the most destructive raid of all took place on 15 August 1940, when a force of about fifty Junkers JU 88s was picked up by radar as they came in over the North Sea from Aalborg in Denmark. Spitfires and Hurricanes intercepted them and shot down nine, but the rest pressed on to cross the coast south of Bridlington and put in a lethal attack on RAF Driffield, some ten miles inland. The airfield got no warning – except that a family dog in a house two miles away took cover a few seconds before the raiders arrived. Suddenly a swarm of them was dive-bombing and strafing the airfield with cannons and machine guns. To one survivor it seemed that the raiders were ‘so low you could almost reach out and touch them’. Farm workers in the fields dived for cover into the stooks of corn as the Luftwaffe pilots opened up on them. In the words of the air historian Patrick Otter,

  Within a few short minutes they devastated the airfield. Four of the five big brick-built hangars were badly damaged, many ancillary buildings were left on fire, twelve Whitleys [bombers] were destroyed, and thirteen people were killed and numerous others wounded.

  Enemy attack was one hazard; but accidents also took a severe toll, often the result of training flights. Clarrie East, who grew up in the village of Tockwith, remembered a Halifax bomber from RAF Marston Moor taking the top off the vicarage before crashing on the airfield boundary. On the night of 22–23 November 1943 two Halifaxes collided soon after take-off for a raid on Berlin; both crashed into farmland at Barmby, and all fourteen men on board were killed. Later fourteen oak trees were planted on the site, each bearing the name of one of the dead. Jean Didlock, a WAAF ambulance driver, had an unnerving experience when she was asked to go and pick up a flying helmet which someone had spotted lying around after a crash. ‘When I did,’ she reported, ‘I found a head inside it.’ Young John Dawson, a schoolboy, was almost killed when riding on a tractor. A crashing Halifax came down so close that he and the driver were both showered with blazing fuel and suffered severe burns, which put them in hospital for months.

  In Yorkshire, as in all RAF bomber stations, WAAFs played a vital role, handling all the operational information which came down from headquarters, and also bolstering the air crews with emotional support. At Pocklington they would assemble on the roof of the watchtower as aircraft took off. ‘We felt it helped the boys to know we were there,’ said Edith Kup.

  I have always felt one of our most important functions was to provide a shoulder to cry on and
a sympathetic ear to any member of the air crew wanting to get something off his chest. It was always highly confidential, and no one ever breathed a word to anyone else about it.

  Carnaby, near Bridlington, became an emergency landing ground, with an immense runway, 3000 yards long and 250 wide – five times the normal width – extended by 500 yards of grass at either end. It was also equipped with the fog-dispersal system known as FIDO, in which pipes laid along either side of the runway were pumped full of petrol. The fuel was released through burners placed every few yards, and when lit formed parallel lines of fire, visible in low-lying fog. In the memory of Jack Bainbridge, a flight mechanic, it was ‘an amazing sight … Many aircraft used this facility when they were unable to land at their own drome. It was an eye-opener to see just how many types of bomber were parked up when the fog had cleared.’ During the war Carnaby recovered more than 1500 aircraft either suffering mechanical failure or shot up in battle.

  With such intensive flying, civilian casualties were inevitable – as when another damaging raid hit Yorkshire in the last weeks of the war. On the night of 3 March 1945 a mass of German fighters attacked British bombers on their way home. About 100 JU 88s infiltrated the incoming bomber streams and shot down at least twenty-four of them. One Junkers pilot, Hauptmann Johann Dreher, brought down two Halifaxes of 158 Squadron returning to RAF Lissett, near Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast. Clearly fired up by his success, he pressed on inland to hit the airfield at Elvington, near York, strafing the road and a passing taxi; but then, curling round at very low level to make another attack, his aircraft clipped a tree and crashed into Dunnington Lodge farm, killing him and his three-man crew, as well as the wife and daughter-in-law of the farmer, Richard Moll. The farmer himself was severely burnt, and later died of his injuries.

  Fifteen

  American Invasion

  Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer,

  Looky-look, there’s our field over there.

  Though we’ve one motor gone,

  We can still carry on,

  Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer.

  USAF bomber crews’ song

  When the Americans came, they came in thousands. Goaded into action against the Axis powers by the devastating Japanese attacks on the US fleet in Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, they hastened to Britain’s aid. The first servicemen arrived in packed troopships on 26 January 1942 – the vanguard of a tremendous influx, which over the next three and a half years amounted to three million men and women, including those who passed through Britain to fight in continental Europe.

  The American invasion wrought huge change in the countryside, as great stretches of farmland were taken for airfields, and one village after another was beefed up not just by hundreds of temporary inhabitants, but also by whole new camps. While concrete runways lanced across the fields, and control towers and hangars sprouted, around villages and towns barrack huts, canteens, hospitals and ammunition stores sprang up: parks were tarmacked or concreted for lorries and tracked vehicles, with a guardroom, barrier and sentry box at the entrance. Almost everything was new. Whenever a big country house was requisitioned for military use, not only was the main building taken over, but stables and cottages on outlying parts of the estate were also occupied. The main concentration was in East Anglia, which was so densely populated by US servicemen and vehicles that it became known as ‘Little America’.

  A BBC survey made in April 1942 suggested that most Britons held practically no opinions about America except what they had gleaned from Hollywood movies. The majority of people seemed never to have thought much about the Yanks – but now suddenly they were infiltrated by hordes of them.

  ‘Over-sexed, over-paid, over-fed and over here’ was not the verdict of most country folk. Some found the GIs brash and vulgar, with an inclination to boast, and some resented the fact that – through no fault of their own – the soldiers hung around with little to do as they waited to go into action; but on the whole the newcomers were received with good humour. They were friendly, high-spirited, generous and polite: officers billeted on private homes almost invariably addressed the lady of the house as ‘Ma’am’. The servicemen were furnished with inexhaustible supplies of food, particularly chocolate and chewing gum – rare treats for the children. In no time five-year-olds were dancing round them pleading for handouts. All Yanks appeared to be loaded with money: their pay was five times higher than British equivalents, and, as they had no living expenses, they boosted many a local economy by spending freely in pubs.

  Most of the GIs were conscripts, drafted into the army, and as hardly any of them had left America before, the United States War Department issued a seven-page pamphlet designed to introduce them to the peculiar habits of their British allies. But the booklet had another purpose as well: to refute Nazi propaganda, which claimed that Britain and America were not securely united.

  ‘You are going to Great Britain as part of an Allied offensive – to meet Hitler and beat him on his own ground,’ the pamphlet began.

  For the time being you will be Britain’s guest … America and Britain are allies. Hitler knows that they are both powerful countries, tough and resourceful. He knows that they, with the other United Nations, mean his crushing defeat in the end. So it is only common sense to understand that the first and major duty Hitler has given his propaganda chiefs is to separate Britain and America and spread distrust between them.

  The advice given was sensible and down to earth. Remember that the British are ‘more guarded in conduct’ than us. Don’t show off – the British dislike bragging. British taxicabs look antique because Britain makes tanks for herself and Russia, and hasn’t time to make new cars. The British make much of Sunday, and all the shops are closed. ‘The British don’t know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don’t know how to make a good cup of tea. It’s an even swap.’

  Many other subjects were covered in a light-hearted way – pubs, cricket, football, cinemas, driving on the left – but now and then the tone of the pamphlet hardened:

  Don’t be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. If they need to be, they can be plenty tough. The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.

  Sixty thousand British civilians – men, women and children – have died under bombs, and yet the morale of the British is unbreakable and high. A nation doesn’t come through that if it doesn’t have plain, common guts.

  The British are tough, strong people and good allies. You won’t be able to tell the British much about ‘taking it’. They are not particularly interested in taking it any more. They are far more interested in getting together in solid friendship with us, so that we can all start dishing it out to Hitler.

  Any GI who read the pamphlet soon saw that it was talking turkey, and many were shocked by the state to which bombing had reduced British towns. One man, docking at Avonmouth after twenty-eight days at sea, remembered ‘all around the area, huge craters – fresh! The fear ran through the ship like a shot.’

  Some incoming Americans went first to transit camps, like the one at Bettisfield Park, near Wrexham, before moving on to more permanent accommodation. Having arrived by sea, often at night, they spent two or three days under canvas before being transferred to their new destinations: thousands went by rail, but many travelled by road, and country lanes were constantly blocked by convoys of troop-carrying trucks.

  The more permanent camps were generally on the edges of towns, or out in the country, but their inmates naturally gravitated into centres of civilization. Officers were often billeted in hotels, and the GIs came in for recreation. The genteel town of Cheltenham, for instance, was soon full of American troops walking the streets in their well-cut uniforms of smooth cloth (far more chic than rough, ill-fitting British battledress) or driving around in green Willys jeeps embellished with the emblem of a white star in a circle. Saturday-night dances at t
he Town Hall boiled with activity, as local girls, eager for the silk stockings and make-up which they knew they could wheedle out of their suitors, happily teamed up with new partners for the night. At weekends the pubs filled with GIs, who generally described British beer as ‘warm and weak’. But any who over-indulged were liable to be grabbed by the US Military Police – martinets who patrolled the town in jeeps and threw drunks into the back of their vehicles like sacks of potatoes. Whenever air-raid sirens sounded, all loitering Americans would take off at such a speed for their camps that locals reckoned the danger from hurtling vehicles was greater than that from falling bombs.

  Similar scenes were common in the West Country, where cider often proved a knockout. Pub landlords would limit GIs to two pints apiece. If they stuck to beer, they could manage, but if they drank locally made scrumpy, a couple of jars would put them under, and away they would be carted.

  At Chipping Norton, in Oxfordshire, the Americans had a camp behind the brewery in Albion Street and kept their tanks parked in fields outside the town. On Saturday evenings trucks carried off loads of girls to dances on the base, and many an unofficial union took place in out-of-the-way corners. But there was one particular address which attracted off-duty American soldiers like a honey-pot. Richard Hunt, thirteen in 1944, never forgot how, at weekends, they booked themselves into his mother’s boarding house in the Market Place, ate spam and eggs with jam on them for breakfast, and spent every free moment playing poker or pontoon in the dining room. Smoking continuously, for hours on end, they hardly spoke, except to say ‘Raise ya’ or ‘See ya’, totally absorbed in a war of cards, with the real war far from their minds.

  Some of the Yanks, away from home for the first time, found England depressing. ‘The sun doesn’t come out much,’ wrote one private to a friend in Pennsylvania. ‘I don’t know why I ever thought I’d like to come here’ – and of course waiting for action was unsettling: ‘I sure wish they would get started here. It really gets on your nerves just to sit and think about it.’ Most letters home, though, were more cheerful: ‘You don’t have to worry about being a bachelor … The air-raid shelters sure come in handy when you are courting a girl.’