Wings
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The force was led by Lieutenant Commander James Stewart-Moore, who flew as an observer. He was a pre-war professional and it seemed to him that the mission was ‘fairly straightforward’. One of the Swordfish carried radar that would help the hunt, which appeared to have been simplified by the assurance, given in the pre-operational briefing, that there were no friendly ships in the area.
Despite the Force 8 gale, all aircraft got off safely with the radar-equipped machine leading. It was operated by the observer, Sub-Lieutenant N. C. Cooper. There was no wireless link between the aircraft and they had to use hand signals. Stewart-Moore recalled that ‘after a while I saw Cooper waving to me’.13 He managed to convey the message that something was showing up twenty miles to starboard. This was unexpected. Bismarck had not been heading in that direction. As no other ships were meant to be in the area Stewart-Moore ordered the force to begin their attack.
Descending through the cloud they sighted the ship and prepared to drop their torpedoes. ‘Everything looked promising,’ remembered Stewart-Moore. It was then that his pilot, Lieutenant Hugh de Graff Hunter, realized their mistake. It was not Bismarck, but the cruiser Sheffield, which Somerville had detached to shadow the battleships at a distance. Hunter waggled his wings to try and warn the others, but it was too late. Their torpedoes were plunging into the sea and racing off towards the cruiser, while Stewart-Moore ‘watched from above, horrified and praying for a miracle’. God was listening. ‘Without any apparent reason, all the torpedoes except one or two, blew up within half a minute of striking the water.’
Back on board they were met with ‘profuse apologies’ and another attack was prepared. The dud torpedoes had been fitted with ‘Duplex’ firing pistols, which were supposed to be activated by the magnetic field of a ship’s hull. Stewart-Moore persuaded Somerville to let them use torpedoes with conventional pistols for the next attempt.
Six sub-flights of Swordfish, fifteen aircraft in all, were ranged for the attack. It would be led by Lieutenant Commander Tim Coode of 818 Squadron. John Moffat was his wing man. ‘It was all on us now,’ he remembered. ‘It was a question of salvaging our reputations . . . We were under no illusions about how important this was to the navy and to Churchill and we felt under enormous pressure to pull it off.’14
The weather had not improved. On the flight deck ‘the wind hit you like a hammer threatening to knock you down . . . the deck crews were really struggling with the aircraft, spray was coming over the side and the waves were breaking over the front of the flight deck.’ He felt he was ‘thrown into the air rather than lifting off’. They were helped on their way by the Deck Control Officer, Lieutenant Commander Pat Stringer, who stood well over six feet and had to be harnessed to a stanchion to avoid being blown overboard. He seemed to be able to gauge the ship’s surges and plunges to perfection. ‘He would signal to start the take-off when he sensed that the ship was at the bottom of a big wave, so that even if I thought that I was taking-off downhill, the bows would swing up at the last moment and I would be flying above the big Atlantic swell rather than into it.’
Eventually all the aircraft were airborne and they formed up and headed off. On their way to the target they passed Sheffield, which this time they correctly identified. From the deck a lamp winked the signal that Bismarck was only twelve miles ahead. They approached at 6,000 feet above a thick blanket of murk. Coode ordered them into line astern and they dived down. When he emerged from the cloud at 300 feet Moffat was alone. Bismarck was about two miles away and ‘even at this distance the brute seemed enormous to me’. He turned to starboard and towards her. Immediately there was ‘a red glow in the clouds ahead of me about a hundred yards away as anti-aircraft shells exploded’. The gunners were aiming just ahead of him and their fire threw up ‘walls of water’. Two shells exploded below him, knocking him off course, but he pressed on, only fifty feet above the waves, sure that ‘every gun on the ship was aiming at me’.
He retained enough composure to calculate the amount he would have to lay off when aiming to be sure of hitting the target and, with Bismarck looming, he felt he could not miss. He was about to press the release button when he heard his observer Sub-Lieutenant John ‘Dusty’ Miller shouting, ‘Not yet, John, not yet!’ It dawned on Moffat that Miller was waiting for a trough in the waves, so the torpedo would not get knocked off-track. ‘Then he shouted, “Let her go!” and the next [moment he] was saying, “John, we’ve got a runner.”’
As the torpedo fell away the Swordfish leapt upwards. Moffat was desperate to keep it below the trajectory of the Bismarck’s guns and managed to execute a ski turn. The slow speed of the machine allowed him to skid round and set off, skimming the wavetops until he felt it safe enough to climb into the cover of the clouds.
At the debriefing it emerged that two and possibly three torpedoes had found the target. This did not mean success, as Bismarck’s flanks were thickly armoured and a torpedo strike earlier in the pursuit had failed to do fatal damage. But then news began to filter in of astonishing developments. Bismarck had turned round and was heading straight into the path of the battleship King George V.
One of the torpedoes had hit the stern, jamming her rudders at 12 degrees and making steering impossible. All she could do was await the end, which came after a night of torpedo attacks and three-quarters of an hour of battering by the fleet’s big guns before she went down, with the loss of all but 118 of the 2,224 men on board.
The essential part that the FAA had played in the removal of the Bismarck menace was acknowledged. But the poor quality of its equipment meant that the courage and skill of its crews were often employed in vain. Its performance was exemplified by the heroic failure of Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde and 825 Squadron to stop the cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau as they made their ‘Channel Dash’ from the Atlantic to home waters in February 1942. Esmonde was killed and received a posthumous VC, but the German ships got through.
When modern dive-bombers such as the Fairey Barracuda came into service on the carriers, they failed to deliver ostentatious results. Churchill’s natural impatience led to an unfortunate outburst in which he appeared to accuse the FAA of not trying hard enough. In July 1943 he sent a memo to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Albert Alexander, noting the ‘rather pregnant fact’ that out of the 45,000 officers and ratings in the service ‘only thirty should have been killed, missing or prisoners during the three months ending April 30’. This was despite the ‘immense demands . . . made on us by the Fleet Air Arm in respect of men and machines’.15
This outburst understandably sparked anger in the Admiralty. Churchill seemed to imply that the performance of a military organization could be measured by the number of its members who got themselves killed. The FAA defended its record, claiming that it was ‘a matter beyond dispute that, in proportion to its size, the Fleet Air Arm has given bigger results than any branch of any other service’.16 It was, however, a matter of fact that when Churchill made his stinging observation it had been more than a year since the FAA had sunk a ship. The criticism provoked action. When it seemed that the German battleship Tirpitz, which had been badly damaged in a daring attack by midget submarines in the autumn of 1943, might be ready to go to sea again, the navy pushed the FAA forward to deal with her. Throughout the middle months of 1944 large carrier forces were engaged in laborious operations to launch Barracuda attacks on Tirpitz as she lay in Kaafjord in Northern Norway. The FAA aviators flew with their customary bravery, skill and determination, but the results were disappointing. At the end of the summer the Admiralty had to admit defeat and hand the job to Bomber Command.
Much of the work of both the FAA and Coastal Command was carried out unseen and unsung. Coastal Command’s motto was ‘Constant Endeavour’ and that summed up its fate, carrying out endless, unglamorous duties, the crucial importance of which would only be noticed if they ceased to be performed.
They flew from the first to the last day of the war, conducting over 240,000 op
erations of all varieties. They attacked German seaborne supply lines, in the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay and Scandinavian waters. They flew endless photo-reconnaissance and meteorological missions. And they roamed the seas hunting U-boats, destroying 212 of them. It was all lonely and dangerous work, and costly in machines and men. Coastal Command lost more than 2,000 aircraft and nearly 6,000 aircrew in the course of the war.
John Slessor, who was in charge for the crucial months from February 1943 to January 1944 when the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height, gave a memorable description of what was involved. It meant ‘junior commanders and crews – hundreds of miles out in the Bay [of Biscay] or on the convoy routes, fighting the elements almost as much as the enemy, but when the tense moment came, going in undaunted at point-blank range against heavy fire, knowing full well that if they were shot down into the cruel sea their chances of survival were slender indeed.’17 Their reward was the heartfelt thanks of the merchant seamen, who looked up from heaving decks and felt a comforting presence amid the harshness and perils of their existence.
Many stricken bomber crews, limping home after a night over Germany, and many a shipwrecked mariner, also had reason to be profoundly grateful to the Command’s air sea rescue squadrons, which saved the lives of 10,663. Landing flying boats on anything but flat seas was perilous, so aircraft instead dropped rubber dinghies and supplies. Then powered lifeboats were developed that were designed to be dropped from converted bombers by parachute. In May 1943 279 Squadron, based at Bircham Newton, King’s Lynn, had just received the new boats, which had two engines and could carry up to a dozen men and weighed three-quarters of a ton. On 5 May, Flight Sergeant A. Mogridge and his crew were told that a Halifax had ditched 50 miles east of Spurn Head in Yorkshire. They took off in their Vickers Warwick and ‘after about an hour’s flying we sighted another [aircraft] circling. We made for it and were able to see a large dinghy with a number of chaps waving like the dickens.’ After a careful approach they dropped the lifeboat, whereupon the Warwick ‘rose like a balloon for about a hundred feet’. Mogridge ‘turned sharply and we watched the boat going down. The three ’chutes had opened OK and it was floating down nicely, a bit faster than a man would. It hit the water about fifteen to twenty yards from the dinghy with a large splash . . . we were all tremendously pleased and felt on top of the world . . . the boys in the drink who had by this time climbed aboard the boat, they seemed cheerful too.’18
The ASR squadrons shared the same hazards as the men they were rescuing. A few weeks later Mogridge was summoned by his CO and told that a dinghy had been spotted by Coastal Command Beaufighters a few miles north-west of the North Sea island of Borkum. As the Beaufighters were on their way to carry out a shipping strike, they could not divert. Mogridge was given the option of waiting until dusk before attempting a rescue, but after consulting with his crew decided to risk a daylight mission when there would be a greater chance of locating the dinghy. They flew out low, but as they approached the place where the dinghy had last been seen they saw a Dornier circling the area. They pressed on nonetheless. ‘All of us were ready for action with fingers near the gun tits,’ he wrote. ‘We couldn’t see if they were over a dinghy and were reluctant to leave until this was established. However, the rear gunner must have spotted us because he started to spray us wildly. There didn’t seem to be much direction to his fire.’ Some of his shots, though, found a target. A single round pierced the rear turret, hitting the gunner, Flight Sergeant Ted Rusby instantly.
‘This made me feel very bitter,’ wrote Mogridge. ‘Pushing the throttle open we went after the Hun. I gave him a couple of long bursts with the front guns and saw strikes on the fuselage and engines.’ The Dornier was still firing back, though, and now ‘Mac’ the navigator had been hit in the thigh. Mogridge broke off the attack and headed for home. There were ambulances standing by when they landed. ‘Mac’ had a nasty wound but would survive. Ted was dead from a bullet to the heart. Death was never far away, but its sting was still painful. The intimacy of operations made brothers out of strangers. ‘We all grieved the loss of a gallant airman and a great personal friend,’ wrote Mogridge. ‘We had been together for over a year.’19
Chapter 13
Wind, Sand and Stars
Wherever Britain sent soldiers, the air force went with them. In the first years of the Second World War RAF Squadrons would serve in Greece, Iraq, Kenya, Palestine, Sudan, Singapore and points east, and, above all, in the deserts and skies of North Africa. The assets Britain and its dominions could deploy against the Axis powers were severely limited. It was essential that they combined in the most efficient and frictionless manner. By and large, co-operation between the air force and its naval and military comrades was good. Middle East Command’s frequent requests for more aircraft and men were often supported by the other services in the field – an unusual circumstance that caused the brass fighting the war from desks in Whitehall to wonder what was going on.
Egypt duty could seem at times like a holiday. The main RAF depot was at Aboukir, close to sandy Mediterranean beaches and the bars and nightclubs of cosmopolitan Alexandria. It could also feel like hell. The desert was a testing environment in which to operate aircraft. Arthur Tedder, who would go on to lead the force, left a description of arriving at a place where ‘everything was covered with a fine, very soft yellow powder – though it did not feel soft with a thirty or forty mile an hour wind behind it. Eyes blinked and teeth gritted with the sand. Outside one had to wear goggles and some people occasionally even used their gas masks. On one occasion I had the front mud flaps of my car literally sand-blasted down to the bare metal in the course of an hour’s drive against the dust.’1
Nothing could stop the march of dust and grit. Air-cleaners for Blenheims had to be cleaned after five hours flying – a job that took three hours. Sand got into instruments and worked its way into the propeller bearings so that the blades could not be moved to coarse-pitch when cruising. The desert sun cracked and buckled canopy perspex. The problems were multiplied by the chronic shortage of spares.
The RAF was trying to run a long-distance campaign through tortuous supply lines. With the entry of the Italians into the war the passing of convoys through the Mediterranean became hazardous and most reinforcements and supplies came round the Cape of Good Hope, a journey that took eight weeks. The problem of supplying aircraft was alleviated by the opening of a staging post at Takoradi on the Gold Coast, modern-day Ghana. Airfields were laid down, hangars and workshops and accommodation blocks built, so that by the end of 1940 a first-class service was in place to speed machines into theatre. They would arrive by ship in crates, to be reassembled, then were flown on by delivery pilots and crews. The 3,600-mile, six-day journey took them via Lagos, Kano, Maiduguri, Fort Lamy, Geneina and Khartoum, before ending at Aboukir. By the close of 1943 more than 5,000 aeroplanes had been sent to Egypt by the Takoradi air bridge.
The RAF’s initial enemies in North Africa were the Italians. The Regia Aeronautica looked good on paper with more than 2,000 aircraft in the region. Their Savoia-Marchetti bomber was more effective than the Blenheim and could outpace the biplane Gladiator fighters, which were all that were available until Hurricanes began to come in from Takoradi. Some of the crews had been blooded fighting for the Francoists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Like their earthbound brothers-in-arms, however, the hearts of the Italian aviators were not in it. On 9 December 1940 General Richard O’Connor launched Operation Compass to counter a tentative Italian offensive. Before the battle started, RAF bombers from Malta and Egypt pounded enemy airfields, destroying many aircraft on the ground. Ports, ammunition and supply dumps, and troop formations were all targeted relentlessly as the Italian retreat collapsed into rout and mass surrenders. When the fighting finished, the victory in the air was as complete as the success on the ground. The Italians lost fifty-eight aircraft in combat. Another ninety-one were captured intact and a staggering 1,100 damaged machines overrun duri
ng the helter-skelter advance. Henceforth the Italian air force was crippled and offered no serious threat to British operations until Italy surrendered in 1943. The price of victory was minimal. For the period from 9 December 1940 to February 6 1941 the total losses amounted to six Hurricanes, eleven Blenheims, five Gladiators, three Wellingtons and one Vickers Valentia cargo biplane.
With the arrival of the Germans in North Africa in early 1941 the RAF were confronted with a far more dangerous opponent. As Rommel’s forces swept away the gains of O’Connor’s offensive, the air force – already weakened by the decision to detach squadrons to assist in the doomed attempt to keep Hitler out of Greece – fell back to Egypt.
A long pause followed, during which both sides prepared for what was expected to be the decisive encounter. In that time aeroplanes poured in through Takoradi, including American Tomahawk, then Kittyhawk fighters. The expanding force needed a vast number of ground staff to keep it in the air. The technical nature of flying meant the RAF trailed a longer logistics ‘tail’ than the other services, a necessity that was nonetheless a source of continual irritation to Churchill, who calculated that it took more than a thousand men to operate one squadron of sixteen aircraft.
The ground crew airmen were mainly British. They included my father Ernest, a fitter at Aboukir, who also flew on operations ranging from spraying the local marshes with DDT to clandestine missions landing agents on Mediterranean islands. The fliers came from everywhere that Britain had planted a flag, and beyond. There were South Africans, Rhodesians, Australians, New Zealanders and Free French. The South Africans were to play a particularly prominent part in the Desert Air Force (as it became known), providing crews for half the light bomber force and a large part of the fighter strength. South Africans starred in some of the great stories of the campaign. In March 1941, as British forces were pushing the Italians out of Somaliland, No. 3 (Fighter) Squadron raided an enemy air base at Dire Dawa in Ethiopia. During the attack a Hurricane piloted by Captain4 John Frost was hit and forced-landed on the airfield. Frost jumped out and set fire to his machine. His wingman, Lieutenant Bob Kershaw, saw his predicament and brought his Hurricane down through a hail of enemy fire to land alongside him. Frost clambered into the narrow cockpit and sat down on Kershaw’s lap. The two then took off, as rounds flashed about them, with Frost operating the joystick and rudder, while Kershaw worked the flaps and the undercarriage lever.