101 Nights

by Ray Ollis

  Only six weeks after ABC was introduced, and only a month after CORONA was introduced, German women gave instructions to the night-fighters; German-speaking WAAFs were used for the first time on 23/24 November on the third attack in the long-running Battle of Berlin, and directed the German pilots to land. Many did.

  The first PFF raid is infamous. On the night of 17/18 August 1942 the Flensburg U-boat construction yards were raided, led by the PFF. Don Bennett, their commanding officer, furiously objected, citing the bad weather and the four different aircraft the PFF had been issued with, each of which had a different ceiling and speed. The met wind prediction was wrong and the bombers drifted north; towns in Denmark were bombed instead.

  There were still Avro Manchester squadrons as the Lancaster came onto operations. Harris despised the bureaucrats who insisted on using the inadequate Napier Vulture engines on the Manchester.

  The planners tried to stagger the different types of aircraft and their operational heights to minimise ‘friendly’ bombing. But many RAF aircraft were destroyed like this, others returning with holes or unexploded ordnance. On the first Thousand Bomber Raid, statisticians calculated that the number of bombers likely to collide was two; Bomber Command considered this an acceptable risk given that without the bomber stream, many more bombers would be shot down.

  Five

  Introduced in March 1942, Gee was a variant on the German Knickebein target location system. The Gee set was a cathode ray tube—rather like a primitive television. By August 1942 the Germans had developed Heinrich, which jammed Gee ground transmissions; by November Gee was unusable; the British countered with Oboe in December.

  Window was used on the first of four massive RAF raids on Hamburg, on 24/25 July 1943, predating the use of ABC and Corona. The 27/28 July raid caused a firestorm. Window consisted of bundles of 2,200 strips of coarse black paper with aluminium foil stuck to one side. These metallised strips could swamp German radar sets—particularly the Wurzburgs and Lichtensteins—with false echoes making them useless.

  Window was introduced reluctantly, lest it affect allied defences. Nevertheless it was estimated that its use in the six major raids which comprised the Battle of Hamburg ‘saved’ over 100 bombers aircraft. The Luftwaffe’s version was called Duppel (i.e., double).

  A googly is a ball bowled in cricket which turns in the direction opposite to what the batsman might expect, deceiving him. ‘Every ball a wicket’ means that for every ball bowled, a batsman is dismissed—an almost impossible success. At the time, the British surface attitude to war as a game of cricket was mirrored in the RAF.

  On 14 May 1940, the Germans threatened to bomb Rotterdam unless it surrendered, which it did. Some bombers already despatched didn’t receive the cancellation order and about 800 civilians died, causing worldwide outrage. The Germans considered bombing Rotterdam to be strategic, and later bombed Coventry and London to destroy targets like oil, food, supplies and military-manufacturing. The British, outraged by what they considered deliberate, cowardly and unnecessary attacks on civilians, learned a great deal from the German bombing. With the assistance of America and its Lend-Lease loans, in the final eighteen months of the war the Allies devastated German cities in kind, diverting millions to the air defence of the Reich rather than resisting Allied invasion forces.

  A fire-storm from the air. ‘On a wide horizon, from north to south, a single fiery glow; above this, while we had a clear starry sky above us, an enormous cloud whirled and billowed upon itself over the city, reaching to the sky with sharp, threatening edges. I was reminded of a volcano eruption …’ (Dr Franz Termer as quoted in Lowe). Nuremberg had avoided major destruction in previous raids; the most destructive raid on the city was on 2/3 January 1945 where, although great damage was caused by fire, there was no actual firestorm; Ollis did not fly on this raid. Martin Middlebrook’s The Nuremberg Raid deals with the ‘Night of the Big Winds’ (the worst of several), which resulted in the loss of almost 100 bombers.

  Aircrew were guarded around ‘correspondents’.

  This statement, even in 1943 (as opposed to 1940), would have been hotly denied by many pilots. However Ottaway quotes Guy Gibson, at a talk at a gunnery school in Quebec, ‘navigators were rapidly taking the place of the pilot as the “main man” in a bomber crew. He didn’t like to say this as he was a pilot himself, but it was true.’ Fighter and fighter-bomber pilots were their own navigators.

  Of Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, Morris quotes Flight Lieutenant Ron A. Read; ‘[Bomber Pilot] breached the ‘line-shooting’ code of the RAF, and [Cheshire] was regarded with some suspicion by many who read it, including most of my contemporaries. We couldn’t accept that anyone who could break the code in such a way, obtaining considerable publicity while doing so, could still be a genuine, down-to-earth, ordinary operational pilot.’ Cheshire was later awarded the Victoria Cross for numerous acts of gallantry.

  Reminiscent of the 27/28 July ‘firestorm’ raid on Hamburg. Joe’s comment seems brutal—if pragmatic—about the unspeakable horror of burning thousands of civilians to death. Given Ollis’s earlier remark about ‘useless, helpless civilians’ (above), every crew knew they were flying an extremely flammable aircraft into a ‘very hot’ place, that on each raid they were running a small but significant risk of being burned alive … as they flew through the hot air and cloud of a burning city, many would smell burning human flesh.

  ‘… in addition to their bombing role, some elements of V/KG 2 began to intercept bombers over England and from late August …1943, intruders once more presented a threat to Bomber Command.’ Parry, Intruders over Britain: The Luftwaffe Night Fighter Offensive 1940–1945 (1987). Regular German intruder operations lasted until April 1944. Parry relates; ‘the only 101 Squadron Lancaster brought down by a German intruder was Lancaster III ED410, early in the morning of the 28 September 1943. Refused permission to land at Ludford, Pilot Officer Skipper had been diverted to Lindholm where, over the Wickenby airfield, Oberleutnant Abrahamczik shot the Lanc down … none of the eight crew had time to escape before the aircraft crashed and exploded in flames.’

  The role of the ‘Master Bomber’ (or ‘Raid Controller’) was introduced by Guy Gibson on the Dams Raid of 16 May 1943. Gibson performed this job once more, on the raid of 19 September 1944 on Rheydt and Monchengladbach on which he was shot down by Bernard McCormack, the mid-upper gunner in a returning Lancaster of 61 Squadron.

  Peenemunde was the German secret research and development site on the Baltic, catering principally to the V2 rockets. The raid was essential; the master bomber was Group Captain John H. Searby (The Everlasting Arms, 1988). It is thought that this raid delayed the appearance of the V2 over Britain by two months. Forty-four allied aircraft were lost, partly due to the attack being deliberately made in moonlight, and partly because the Germans had just introduced Schrage Musik (two upward-firing cannons) in their Me 110 night-fighters.

  At 8 am on 18 August, Jeschonnek received a call; ‘Peenemunde, which, as the birthplace of the V-weapons, was the apple of [Jeschonnek’s] eye, had been the target of an extremely heavy precision air attack.’ Half an hour later Jeschonnek was found dead on the floor, his pistol beside him. He left a note: ‘I can no longer work together with the Reichsmarschall. Long live the Fuhrer’ (E.R. Hooton, Eagle in Flames. The Fall of the Luftwaffe, 1999). The damage to Peenemunde was less than first thought; neither the testing blocks nor the irreplaceable construction drawings had been destroyed (Cajus Bekker: The Luftwaffe War Diaries, 1967); even so, the Peenemunde raid was the last straw for Jeschonnek. The Luftwaffe was losing control over events. Jeschonnek was caught between ‘the truculence of Hitler, whom he greatly admired, and Goring’; he was a scapegoat for other men’s failings.

  Six

  Cricketers. William Joseph ‘Bill’ O’Reilly (1905–1992) was a great Australian bowler; Harold Larwood (1904–1995) was a precise English fast bowler.

  Many bomber airfields were close to railway lines; B-17s
flying low near trains would have been an everyday sight. There were numerous occasions where an aircraft would, against standing orders, fly too low and ‘buzz’ a train; there were many deaths.

  The original is delightfully rude. Also, singing anything like this near US flyers was asking for a fight. ‘To get good results with the Norden the bombardier needed to make an undisturbed straight and level bomb run lasting three minutes (about nine miles) and be able to observe the target through his sighting telescope during that time … Under operational conditions bomb aiming errors could be anything up to five times as great as those on practice ranges, for visual bombing.’ Ethell and Price, Target Berlin. Mission 250: 6 March 1944 (1981). There is a complex, involved history behind Carl Norden’s bomb-sight; only the two lead B-17s used the sight and the rest of the bombers dropped their bombs when they saw the lead bomber’s load drop, so there was considerable margin for error. Calais is the nearest European port to England and was regarded by the RAF as a cushy target, despite being heavily fortified because the Germans expected the Allies to land there. The Germans fired large calibre guns at England from Calais, later building V1 flying bomb launch ramps.

  Coger’s is still pronounced ‘Koh-jers’.

  Purple Heart. American medal awarded for receiving an injury, regardless of how slight or catastrophic.

  Queens Die Proudly by William Lindsay White (1943); How to Lose a War was metaphorical. Farlow’s remark, ‘I seem to recall the evacuation of Manila was none too glorious’ refers to White’s They Were Expendable (1942).

  The actual paragraph is: ‘Side by side, the Dutch and the Australians plunged through that outer ring of Jap submarines. The American forces took up the last defensive position, skirting the back edge, firing on the run. It was our duty not to dissipate ourselves in lost causes, but to do what damage we could, and conserve our strength to strike again.’ See Roberts, Age Shall Not Weary Them … (1941?); McKie, Proud Echo (1953) and Payne, HMAS Perth … 1936–1942 (1978).

  The question is, ‘which country bore the brunt of the majority of the fighting, Britain and its Empire, or the Americans (who sometimes appear to believe they won it all by themselves)?’ Most combatants in WW2 knew the previous war’s peace had been botched and felt that WW2 was a continuation of The Great War.

  On 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Nazi’s coming to power, three De Havilland Mosquitoes from 105 Squadron bombed Berlin as Goering was about to address the nation, forcing the speech to be postponed. 139 Squadron did the same to Goebbels a few hours later.

  See Gallagher, Retreat in the East (1942) and Clive and Knight’s Milne Bay 1942 (2000); also Graeme-Evans’ two-volume Of Storms and Rainbows. The … 2/12th Battalion AIF … (1991).

  Peter Fitzsimons’ popular overview, Tobruk (2006) should be read alongside Maughan, Tobruk and El Alamein (1966).

  Meaning Russia. In April 1945 Knoke wrote; ‘Communism has now reached the heart of Europe … The destruction of the German Reich means that the last bulwark against Red world-revolution has been overthrown. Over Berlin the Red Flag now flies. There we have the real victor in this war. The way is now open to Stalin. When will his tanks roll across Europe?’

  They were lucky to avoid the more likely scenario of an enthusiastic brawl ending only with the arrival of the Military Police. Disputes and brawls were common.

  Riley specialised in making in sports and racing cars.

  Seven

  The equipment and extra person in a 101 Lanc certainly pushed up the cost. The young pilot officer, by his public schoolboyish slang and this deliberate misquotation, represents England’s privileged upper class. The phrase is attributed to the Duke of Wellington as he passed a cricket match at Eton many years after his victory at Waterloo; according to Sir Edward Creasy, Wellington actually said; ‘There grows the stuff that won Waterloo’—a reference to the quality of the young men of England, not of Eton specifically.

  Ollis did not fly on this raid, and his description seems to be a composite of the last major RAF raid on Berlin, on 24/25 March 1944 (‘the night of the big winds’), and the Nuremberg raid on 30/31 March 1944, which incurred heavy losses.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s, Ode to the West Wind first appeared in Prometheus Unbound (1820). Ollis is referring to the unexpectedly powerful west wind which wrought such havoc on this raid.

  At altitude, ice could build up on an aircraft’s upper surfaces so quickly and thickly that the aircraft could suddenly drop from the sky; the pilot needed skill, courage and luck to be able to recover from such a dive. Ice was also one reason the Air Speed Indicator stopped working. When RAF aircraft weren’t ‘kites’, ‘crates’ or ‘machines’, they were ‘she’ (despite this particular aircraft being V-Victor). Another hold-over from the Royal Navy.

  When Hyde (as Shelley) wants to become part of the ‘wild west wind’, one wonders at the paradox; to the Germans, the ‘wild west wind’ was Bomber Command.

  The aerodrome would set up a radio signal, the pilot would hear an ‘error’ sound when the aircraft was not ‘on the beam’, and a different note when the aircraft was on track. SBA (Standard Beam Approach) was not infallible and required practice to get right. ‘… fog to an Air Force that had yet to be introduced to the wonders of radar and the blind approaches it made possible, all too often sealed pilots off from the ground until they ran out of fuel and the only safe way home was on the end of a parachute …’ (Mackersey). The aircraft would have been abandoned in the air, to fall where it may.

  Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind.

  Middlebrook (The Nuremberg Raid) cites 101 Squadron as dispatching 26 ABC Lancasters. Of these, 20 bombed, 6 were missing, one was wrecked in a crash. 47 men were killed, 8 were POWs and one evader. Feast describes the dining room after the raid; ‘… he was surprised to find the room devoid of any of the WAAF girls who were usually there with a friendly smile and a greeting to serve them their meal. The serving cabinet was filled … but there were no waitresses. Instead, there was a notice pinned to the wall that simply instructed them to help themselves … The WAAFs … were in the rest room, in tears.’ Otter quotes Marjorie Dymond on her first day at Ludford Magna, the day after the Nuremberg raid; ‘there was a gloom over the place I hadn’t met before in my service … 101 Squadron had lost nine aircraft and their crews the night before.’ (Maximum Effort III … 1993).

  Eight

  More aircrew were killed on this Nuremberg raid than in the Battle of Britain.

  Lack of Moral Fibre. RAF code for cowardice, as opposed to being unable to fly for medical reasons (the German term was Kanalkrank).

  In the week following Nuremberg, Bomber Command mounted only a few small raids. 101 missed the next major raid, by 5 Group on 5/6 April, but sent seven Lancs to Villeneuve-St-Georges on 9/10 April.

  In April 1942 Bomber Command forbade wives to live inside 40 miles of an operational station. The effect a devastated wife could have on active station life was disconcerting, but many COs turned a blind eye to the practice.

  Established in 1938 as an aircraft maintenance, storage and training unit, RAF Cosford also housed a hospital.

  The Croix de Guerre is a prestigious French medal.

  Archibald McIndoe pioneered plastic surgery for severe burns before, during and after World War II.

  Winston Churchill was Prime Minister of Britain for most of World War 2. ‘The night of 16/17 October 1940 was particularly unfortunate. During raids by seventy-three bombers on various German targets, only three aircraft were shot down, but ten Hampdens and four Wellingtons crashed in England when attempting to land at their fog-covered bases on return. When this was brought to the attention of Winston Churchill, he immediately memoed his chief of air staff, who had only been in the job for two weeks: “What arrangements have we got for blind landings for aircraft? How many aircraft are so fitted? It ought to be possible to guide them down quite safely as commercial craft were before the war in spite of fog. Let me have full particulars. The ac
cidents last night are very serious.” (Williams). This memo lead to the development and widespread use of the beam approach or glide path landing.

  Ollis seems to assess the cost of each Lancaster at around £42,000; by 1943 standards it was over £45,000, several thousands of times the yearly salary of a flight-sergeant or pilot officer.

  FIDO (Fog Intensive Dispersal Operation) at Ludford was clearly necessary because Ludford was usually the last airfield in the area to disappear beneath the fog, and 101’s RCM were critical. Construction of FIDO at Ludford started in summer 1943, the squadron running ops around the workers until it finally became operational in March 1944. Landing at Ludford was more difficult than at other south-west to north-west airfields because of the potential cross-wind, and landing at Ludford with a cross-wind and FIDO lit up was even more hazardous (partly because the heat could be blown away). Then factor in Otter; ‘the air space around Ludford was particularly busy as the circuits for Binbrook, Kelstern and Ludford virtually overlapped’ (Maximum Effort, The Untold Stories, 1993). ‘… to get back to base and find the place fog-bound isn’t comforting. FIDO … was, to say the least, slightly Heath Robinsonish … pipes along both sides of the landing strip; steel hosepipes, with holes drilled along the top. Come the fog, and the return of the wandering boys, all you have to do is belt high-octane fuel into the pipes, until the juice squirts out of the holes; then (in effect) drop a match. The fog goes like magic. But it’s a little like landing in the mouth of hell, and you’d better not fishtail off that bloody runway. I, for one, never fell in love with FIDO’ (Wainwright, Tail-end Charlie. One Man’s Journey Through a War, 1978). FIDO saved thousands of lives, but FIDO’s flames did reach up to some injured aircraft and blow them apart. Tee Emm (May 1944) attempts to dispel doubt; ‘Prune followed the instructions and found himself safe on the ground. He said the experience was rather like descending into hell; he had half-expected to find Mephistopheles in person standing by the blood wagon.’