by Ray Ollis
Timing in the bombing war was critical in terms of navigation, enabling a large number of aircraft to bomb in swift, successive waves; accurate timing also assisted accurate reporting.
4 Group. Part of 3 Group since July 1941, 101 Squadron were transferred to 1 Group in September 1942. At about the time 101 Nights begins, there were seven Bomber Command Groups in England: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 (Pathfinder Force); 100 Group, dedicated to RCM (Radio Countermeasures), became operational in November 1943.
The RAF was formed by amalgamating the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) during the First World War, so the RAF described their aircraft in nautical terms and maintained Naval traditions. Crews varied their in-aircraft patter depending on how, when and where they were taught, and how they adapted to battle conditions in the air. In order to prevent confusion, crews rarely called each other by name in the air, but by their job; ‘skipper’, ‘rear gunner’ and ‘bomb aimer’.
Ground speed would always be greater than air-speed, because the higher above the ground you are, the further there is to fly, so even if you’re flying at 150 mph three miles up, you’re travelling slower than that ‘on the ground’. Hence ‘indicated’ (meaning ‘indicated air speed’) versus ‘ground speed’. Other variables were the wind speed and direction.
In west Germany, the Ruhr was a 30-mile long tightly packed industrial area near the Rhine which produced large quantities of guns, transport, bombs, ammunition and other militarily helpful products. Usually wreathed in drifting smoke and fog haze, it withstood numerous (relatively ineffective) attacks by the RAF until late October 1944. See also Cooper, The Air Battle of the Ruhr … and Botting From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945–1949.
Flak battery. A concentration of anti-aircraft guns.
The Handley Page Halifax was England’s other major four-engined bomber. Renaut: ‘I had now great faith in the Halifax and its handling qualities and I had seen how it stood up to a battering. Mind you, it took strength in the forearms and wrists to hurl it about the sky, and unlike the Lancaster it responded slowly and heavily … the Lancaster was much gentler to fly but give me the Halifax for a battering every time.’ Although Dyson points out that the successful bale-out rate was higher in ‘Hallybags’ than Lancasters (whose main escape hatch was quite small), more comforting to the Lancaster crews was their considerably higher operational ceiling, which may partly explain why Halifaxes had a higher successful bale-out rate: they were hit more often by the German flak. An August 1942 memorandum from Harris to Portal; ’[the performance of the Halifax is] little better than the [two-engined] Wellington. The Lancaster … at the same all-up weight as the Halifax (59,000 lbs) can carry 3000 lbs more bombs or fly 550 miles further. In addition, it is faster and is more manoeuvrable …’ (McKinstry).
Q-Queenie. Since RFC days the RAF used letters and familiar words to help identify each aircraft over the radio, and prevent misheard letters. For the majority of WW2, no RAF squadron had more than 26 operational aircraft (although 101 was an exception), so each aircraft was unique. The letters which identified each aircraft (and its radio call-sign) were painted in large letters on both sides of the aircraft fuselage, after the two-letter squadron designation code. 101 Squadron’s designation was SR; each aircraft also wore a serial number, painted in much smaller letters on the aircraft’s tail. Radio call-signs in WW2 varied slightly; RAF call-signs were later superseded by the NATO phonetic alphabet (i.e., Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, etc).
With GPS beyond imagining, night bombers used radio beams to find their way. Without them, they were reduced to triangulating their position by the stars, gauging windspeed and groundspeed and hoping their compass was working. The result was often inaccurate bombing.
The corkscrew is sometimes misleading in description; from a novel written by a Lancaster veteran: ‘the standard night-flying evasive action tactic in Bomber Command … the manoeuvre consisted of flying the bomber on a flight path paralleling that of a corkscrew. If the gunners, for instance, reported a nightfighter closing in from the rear port quarter—or eight o’clock—the pilot dived to port in a turn, pulled out and made a climbing turn to port, rolled over into a climbing turn to starboard and, then, completing the cycle, dived to port again. Carried out at night under combat conditions, [the corkscrew] proved itself against German nightfighters whose pilots had found it difficult, in the darkness, to keep a well-corkscrewed Lancaster or Halifax in clear view long enough to line it up in their gunsights for an accurate burst of fire.’ (Geoff Taylor, Beware the Wounded Tiger, Peter Davies, 1971).
‘… we struck our first fighter, a decoy with all lights ablaze flying 1000 yards astern. This was strictly for the birds and, instead of catching us unaware, alerted the entire crew so that when the fighter who was tracking us on instruments started his attack from 5 o’clock we turned smartly into it and he ran through a long burst which so disillusioned him he disappeared into the night. His decoy also doused lights and possibly went in search of more gullible victims’. (Cusack)
Flying a dog-leg ‘meant deliberately to cut across the path of one’s fellow aircraft on leaving or re-entering the stream. It meant running the risk of collision and throwing the advancing war machine out of gear. And yet no one dreamed of arguing. The orders were formal. You had to be on time’. (Calmel) A curve of pursuit ‘consisted of the positioning period, when the attacker flew a parallel course some 1,500 yards behind to the right or left of the aircraft, estimating the course and speed of the other plane. Having assessed this, if he was on the bomber’s starboard or right wing he would bank, drop his port or left wing, and start his attack towards the tail of his target. At approximately 800 yards he would straighten up, pull his sights on to the target, drop his right wing and come in for the attack proper. To nullify this, as soon as he banked the second time, the gunner who had been watching and giving a running commentary to his pilot, knew the enemy was committed to attack and ready to open fire. At 600 yards he gave the command “Turn starboard, go” at which the bomber pilot threw the bomber into a violent turn right. If everything had been estimated correctly, the fighter pilot, already launched on his final thrust, would be unable to turn, and travelling at 150 miles per hour faster than the bomber, would go skidding past its tail. The gunner, estimating distance on his illuminated sight at 600 yards, was supposed to open fire ahead of the plane so that it passed through his fire.’ (Cusack)
‘Hitting’ a slipstream; while the initial tube of disturbed air behind each propellor did dissipate into a long cone, crossing the disturbed air could vary from a slight judder to the physical jolt when a car hits a speed hump on the road, which could cause the aircraft to buck.
By this stage of the war, ‘bombing blind on ETA’ was recognised as unreliable. ‘Every deviation from course, every variation in airspeed or alteration in height, adds another mile to the final error. A difference of one degree gives an error of one mile in sixty, and on the compass one degree is almost indistinguishable. On a flight of 600 miles, then, it will be a good crew that has less than a ten-mile error’ (Cheshire). With no official records and only his log-book and diary, and perhaps only Harris’s Bomber Offensive available to him, Ollis’s depiction of 101’s earlier career is remarkably accurate.
Cheshire; ‘Half our job was to drop the bombs in the right place, the other half to get back intact and fit to fly again. Then navigation: to make use of all available aids; to check the “met” winds by visual pin-point if possible: if not, by taking drifts or Astro sights, or in the last resort by W/T. … we sorted out the navigational equipment and stowed it in the satchel. I never knew there could be so much stuff for what I imagined was a simple operation. Maps, rulers, compass, dividers, CSC, pencils, rubber, penknife, code books, computer, plotter, Astro tables, watch, sextant, planisphere, protractor, log book and Very cartridges.’
Taxying: the aircraft travelling on the ground. The ‘pens’, ‘pans’ or ‘frying pans’ were just
off the perimeter track; aircraft travelled from the perimeter track along a shorter track which ended in a large flat circular area (the pen) where the aircraft were parked between ops, and where the ground crew usually worked on them. The pen was also called a pan because it looked like a frying pan from above.
A firkin is an old English unit of measure applied to volume—thereby liquid, implicitly beer. Today the term is modestly ribald. 101 Nights was published in 1957, when ‘fucking’ could not have been published in any mainstream English book.
For three navigators to be killed with the same pilot—and on the same tour—is long (but not impossible) odds.
Three
‘Pearly Oyster’ is a powerfully lewd sexual innuendo. Aircrew were often housed in Nissen huts. Harvey: ‘The Nissen hut was nothing more than a concrete pad over which corrugated iron sheets were bolted in a continuous arch from one side to the other. The end walls were made of wood. A door and two tiny windows were located at one of the ends. It was large enough to house a row of six iron cots on either side of a central aisle, which was the only spot where you could stand fully erect. Heat was supposedly supplied by a tiny iron stove, erected in and blocking the centre aisle … it was perfectly heat proof.’
The watches used by the RAF during World War 2 were made by several companies but are usually referred to as Longines. Once Bomber Command began operating by night, navigation became a struggle to blend arithmetic and geometry into a practical method of keeping a large aircraft on track in the dark. Dead reckoning computed the speed of the aircraft, the height of the aircraft, and the local wind speed and applied it to a map. Astro navigation assisted to pin-point the aircraft’s position with reference to the stars. Both methods require precision timekeeping—the Mark XI navigator’s watch had a second-hand. The Mark XI also had to be waterproof, vibration-proof and—as aircraft flew higher—temperature and pressure-proof.
By the 1930s, dockworkers were regarded as the most militant and communist of labour groups. Dockworkers were renowned for dropping tools at inopportune moments; in October 1943 London dockworkers went on strike, demanding ‘extra danger money’ to unload American ammunition ships. In May 1943 Sydney dockworkers struck and American soldiers had to give up part of their leave in order to unload ships; in Wellington, New Zealand, the dockworkers struck just before the Marines were due to ship out to Guadalcanal, with the result that the Marines loaded their own gear, adding to the shemozzle on the landing beaches. Such strikes must have worked; many RAF airmen were surprised to find that labourers digging latrine trenches at their aerodrome earned more than they did, partly because of the ‘danger’ involved in working at a wartime ‘target’. See Hal Colebatch’s Australia’s Secret War. How Unions Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II (2014).
A suitably obscene song.
It was not unusual for crew members to experience loose bowels or vomit before (or even during) an operation. Sometimes the captain reported it, sometimes he didn’t. It was only when such an illness interfered with the crew member’s ability to perform his duties that it became a problem.
A logbook entry describing ‘intense light flak’ or ‘moderate heavy flak’ refers to the calibre and type of shell used, not the intensity. German defenders used mostly 88 mm guns and 105 mm guns. The 88s were ‘heavy flak’ and had a ceiling of up to 49,000 feet. The explosive shell had a mechanical time fuze, so it would explode where the bombers were. Heavier flak was later fitted with a proximity fuze to detect a large body (such as an aircraft), exploding regardless of height. 105 mms fired even heavier 32 lb shells but at a much lower height. Medium flak fired more slowly and aircraft had to be flying quite low for light flak to be effective. See Hogg.
The Short Stirling was the first four-engined British heavy bomber of the Second World War. Designed and built by Short Brothers to a 1936 Air Ministry specification the Stirling entered service in 1941, being relegated to second line duties from 1943 when the Halifax and Lancaster took over its role.
There is no reason not to accept both Harris (in Despatch) and Garbett and Goulding that instructions were indeed issued ‘in the early days’. Martin Bowman reports that, on their first night of operation, 7/8 October 1944, that ABC Specials from 101 Squadron, broadcast ‘the order “All butterflies go home” … on the German night fighter frequency, resulting in many enemy night-fighter pilots returning to their airfields!’ (Confounding the Reich …). This technique was code-named CORONA: Countermeasures against Running Commentary. Harris (in Bomber); ‘We had evidence of the effectiveness of this method when we began to hear the enemy controllers lose their tempers.’ CORONA first operated on Kassel on the night of 22/23 October 1943 where the bombs and incendiaries created a firestorm. The three factories constructing V1 bombs were badly affected, delaying the start and degree of the V1 attacks. On the 17 November raid on Ludwigshafen, the CORONA operator told the German nightfighters to land because of fog; most landed early for the loss of only one Lancaster.
Hans Jeschonnek. A career Nazi who transferred to the Luftwaffe in 1933, he became Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe only six years later.
Remscheid, just south east of the Ruhr. ‘The Heinkel He 100D single-seat fighter was, for a considerable period of the war, an enigma. Allocated the designation ‘He 113’ by the Reichsluftfahrtministerium and much publicised under this type number by the German Propaganda Ministry, the fighter never, in fact, bore this appellation … it was generally believed that the He 100 (alias He 113) had entered service with the Luftwaffe, but the fighter was never accepted for service use. Only twelve production He 100D-1 fighters were built and, in a successful attempt to mislead Allied Intelligence, these were repainted with different insignia several times and many propaganda photographs of the fighter distributed, leading to the erroneous belief that the He 100 was in widespread use’ (Green). The 30/31 July 1943 raid on Remscheid ‘marks the true end of the Battle of the Ruhr’. Middlebrook and Everitt do not mention the Heinkel factory, but ‘the post-war British Bombing Survey estimated that 83% of the town was devastated [with] 107 industrial buildings … destroyed; the town’s industry, generally, lost 3 months’ production and never fully regained previous levels’. This raid pre-dates 101’s first use of ABC on 7–8 October.
Commanded by the famous VC winner Hughie Edwards, 460 (RAAF) Squadron also flew Lancasters. Based at Binbrook, a few miles north of Ludford. 100 Squadron, based at Waltham, a few miles north of Binbrook, was the first choice for ABC but, already fitted with the new H2S radar, could not carry both.
It was not unusual for a crew member to drop ‘a little something extra’ with the bomb-load—a brick, a bottle or two or a small practice bomb.
Blackpool Illuminations. Prior to World War I, Blackpool was known for a spectacular display of nearly ten thousand arranged electric light bulbs. Removed during the war, the display returned in 1925 on a much grander scale. The lights went out again in September 1939, returning ten years later.
Perhaps. Deighton (in Bomber); ‘In cash, at 1943 prices with profits pared to a minimum, each Lancaster cost £42,000.’ Harris, Bomber Offensive; ‘The education of a member of a bomber crew was the most expensive in the world; it cost some £10,000 for each man, enough to send ten men to Oxford or Cambridge for three years.’ Deighton continues, ‘Add another £13,000 for bombs, fuel, servicing and ground-crew training at bargain prices and each bomber was a public investment of £120,000.’
However, putting extra strain on an engine can cause it to break down, later leading to serious problems—if not loss of life.
While this incident was rare, it did happen that an airman might faint or swoon under pressure. Calmel even confesses that on the way home, all the crew but the pilot were asleep!
Odds of survival were heatedly discussed in Bomber Command, which had the harshest casualty rate of the British Services in WW2. Of all aircraft on ops, the 1943 average loss was 3.6%, so 33% of all crews might survive a first tour, but only 16% or so
would survive a second. But the radar battle in the night skies over Europe shifted rapidly from late 1943, and the odds shrank …
101 Squadron lost two aircraft on the ‘Thousand Bomber’ raid on Cologne on 30 May 1942; 101 Squadron performed its first ABC operation (7/8 October 1943 against Stuttgart). 1942 was Bomber Command’s year of demonstration and consolidation; the great Bomber Offensive did not start in earnest until 1943.
After much argument, The Pathfinder Force (PFF) was formed in January 1943.
On numerous raids the German fighters were drawn north or simply away from the RAF’s intended target areas by diversionary raids, course changes in the bomber stream, and misleading transmissions in German from an RCM station in England.
In the popular newspaper comic strip Blondie (from 1930) by Chic Young, Blondie Bumstead was the top-heavy blonde and Daisy the family dog. Blondie and Daisy would have been instantly familiar.
Krink’s almost says, ‘mistress’, which would imply that Blondie was a prostitute or loose woman, which Blondie would have found insulting. Sensibly, Krink dries up.
Four
Krink isn’t the only one who cheats on his partner; his American wife’s room-mate appears to either have two boyfriends or Krink’s wife has slipped up and she has a new boyfriend—presumably Ruffles (referring to Ruffles and Flourishes, the fanfare which ushers in dignitaries). This is a loaded paragraph; there are several controversial points. The B-17 Flying Fortress did fly faster and higher than the Lancaster, but the Lanc carried more bombs further than the Fortress day-only bomber. The debate continues.
‘Miss Barbara Cunard’ is intended to represent a member of the fabulously wealthy family of Cunard Line shipping company fame; Ollis loved the cruise liners.
Cusack differs: ‘At briefing, in addition to the Groupy and Wingco was a middle-aged florid officer with bags of rings who was finally pin-pointed as the Group Air Vice-Marshal. An English pilot with twenty ops to his credit remarked, ‘I don’t like the look of this. These bloody AVMs mean a lousy target.’ Air Vice Marshal E.A.B. Rice served 1 Group from 24 February 1943 until 11 May 1945.