101 Nights

by Ray Ollis

  German paratroopers, like the Allied paratroopers, were highly trained and well-disciplined. ‘[O]ne particular item that became something of a Fallschirmjager trademark in North Africa and later, was a brightly coloured neckerchief or silk scarf. Some regiments even adopted uniform colours: FJR 5’s, for example, were dark blue with white polka dots.’ From Fallschirmjäger. German Paratroopers 1935–45, by Bruce Quarrie (Osprey, 2001).

  The grass airfield near Juvincourt-et-Damary in northern France was built during 1938 and 1939; the Germans added three concrete runways, a railway and extensive support facilities. The Luftwaffe’s largest French airfield, Juvincourt was a frequent target in the lead-up to D-Day. Taken from the Germans on 5 September, 1944; the Americans repaired Juvincourt and used it for many USAAF units (mostly fighters) and an emergency airfield for the USAAF and (secondarily) the RAF.

  Two

  There have been many movements attempting to ban ‘Drink, with a capital D’. Books like Frank Russell’s Prohibition Does Work. An Australian Investigator’s Opinion (1930) were not uncommon.

  The surreal world of now-obsolete Australian slang repays investigation.

  ‘Blue’ has long been an Australian nickname for anyone with red hair. ‘Form’, good or bad, is how well you behave with accepted modes of behaviour. ‘To “know someone’s form” is to have summed him up unfavourably; ‘How’s your rotten form?’ is a jeering reproach, given currency in WW2 slang.

  Setting off sirens, dropping lit Very cartridges down chimneys and snipping off ties were all common party games enjoyed by men of the time. Vyacheslav Molotov was the Soviet foreign minister responsible for breaking up Finland (November 1939—March 1940); of necessity the Finns weapon created the contemptuously-named Molotov cocktail (petrol or some other flammable substance in a bottle, with a rag in the neck as a wick. When thrown the bottle shatters and the rag lights the petrol). Molotov was not amused.

  Three

  The Group Captain’s aircraft is an Airspeed Oxford; Airspeed was an aviation company set up by, among others, Nevil Shute Norway in 1934. About 13 miles north of Lincoln, from November 1944 Hemswell was home to Nos 150 and 170 Squadrons.

  Four

  RAF ‘formal nights’ followed a tradition passed down from the Navy. Ollis’s passing negative reference to passing the port is more satirically expressed in Cusack.

  From William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

  Two bombing raids on a town deserted except for our hero seems worthy of Joseph Heller. Although the situation was certainly confused, and the story half-fits the Blenheim IV bombing raids by 14, 45 and 55 Squadrons on Maleme airfield and around Herakleon, this particular situation did not occur.

  Servicemen liberating funds from a bank is not unique.

  ‘I was very fed up’ is a classic British understatement. The stress of operational flying—and its effects—is a subject for many books.

  From Alexandria to Cairo is under 200 miles.

  There was a Voice of Greece (not Crete) anti-German radio station. Fiction or not, Farlow would not have been the first or last flyer to land among the partisans and fight with them.

  A tale worthy of Flashman. Had Farlow’s absence after the Greek lovely pinched his cash and car been explained in this manner to the RAF, instead of the explanation he does provide, he would have been court-martialled for desertion.

  A wry joke; the correct expression is borrowed from golf—‘not up to par’ means ‘below normal’; a faux pas means literally ‘a false step’, and therefore a breach of conduct or manners. Being ‘not up to faux pas’ would mean ‘not being up to his bad behaviour’.

  Chiltern was betting on the snobbery within the RAF whereby the officers got the gong but the other ranks didn’t; this is why the Victoria Cross was initiated, so that ‘nobodies’ of the services could receive an appropriate medal. While this snobbery persisted during WW2, with the introduction of so many officers from the lower and middle classes, as Ollis demonstrates here, it was by no means the rule.

  Five

  Farlow’s BEM was, then, not ‘a bit of a fiddle between Crete and Cairo’, and the story he told Magnetic to excuse his desertion by impressing the RAF was in fact true. Crete was liberated from the Nazis in October 1944.

  A Disney hornpipe. A hornpipe is a naval dance; cartoons acquired a musical soundtrack in the late 1920s and the characters cavorted in exaggerated and improbable time with ‘silly symphonies’.

  See Charles Whiting, The Last Assault (1994) or Alex Kershaw, The Longest Winter (2004). To see the rest of Ray Ollis’s tour in context with the battle in Europe and the immediate aftermath, see the DVD Britain’s Victory in Europe (1995).

  This type of neurosis is mentioned in Mae Mills Link and Hubert A. Coleman’s Medical Support. Army Air Forces in World War II (1992).

  Lincoln Cathedral (née Lincoln Minster), on the highest hill in Lincoln, was an iconic landmark for thousands of aircrew.

  F-numbers describe the size of the camera’s aperture compared to the focal length of the lens. Farlow’s removal of a sophisticated and expensive camera from its mounting and aiming it like a Kodak Box Brownie is extraordinary; if he’d broken it he’d probably face court-martial.

  A circular rainbow can only be seen from a position in the air: as rainbows appear relative to the observer, your aircraft’s shadow will be at the centre of the rainbow.

  The hydraulically operated automatic pilot was attached to the Directional Indicator (‘a gyroscopic heading indicator’) and an attitude indicator. The aircraft would then fly straight on a compass course. The Royal Aircraft Establishment produced a variation in 1930, the invisible pilot (‘George’ or ‘Elmer’) which improved during the war. The 1944 V1 attacks on England lasted from June to October; the V1 flying bomb, buzz bomb or doodlebug flew on automatic pilot; if an aircraft could get close enough to waggle its wings beneath the bomb’s wing, the mixed slipstreams would cause the gimbals to re-adjust—and the bomb would fly straight down. Most V1s were brought down by flak, and rockets from Typhoons or Tempests, but this incident is feasible; although the V1 travelled at 350 mph between 3000 and 4000 feet, even a close pass could cause the V1’s gyro to topple. Ogley states: ‘The 2,419 V1s which dropped in the London boroughs killed 5,126 people. Outside London, 2,789 flying bombs caused another 350 deaths. In terms of casualties the “doodlebugs” were worse than the Blitz.’ Harris (in Bomber) points out that the Germans never achieved their intention of launching 6000 V1s per day; only being ‘able to launch an average of 95 a day between the middle of June and the end of August. Of these only two-thirds made landfall and less than a third reached Greater London.’

  In August 1942 Harris ruled that a tour was 30 ops; the airmen then did six months as an instructor. Anyone surviving as an instructor was only required to do a 20-op second tour. This altered several times during the last months of the war. The ballerina reference is another lewd joke; flexible and bendy, ballerinas were reputed to be superb fun in bed.

  Williams: ‘The idea of emergency aerodromes, capable of accepting aircraft in distress regardless of weather conditions, emanated from a Flight Lieutenant Broadhead of 5 Group … in October 1941 … On the Isle of Thanet in east Kent, [Manston] … was the last of three emergency aerodromes to be constructed in England during the Second World War’, and was operational by the end of May 1944.’ ‘… the total landings at Manston during September 1944 were estimated to be nearly 6,000, and 600 of these were reckoned to be emergencies, with, so far as records confirm, about a score with the use of FIDO’. That’s 200 landings per day, 20 of which were emergencies … ‘it was estimated that a total of 5,796 emergency landings had been made at Manston in its time as an emergency runway …’

  Many pilots would disagree; six machine guns, ammunition and oxygen bottles would certainly have made a difference to the aircraft’s overall weight; when an aircraft is barely flying, removing weight alleviates the stress on the airframe and engines. When the first Mancheste
r prototypes attempted to get off the ground with a full complement of men, weapons and bombs, the aircraft refused to unstick. The surface of the wings was therefore reduced in thickness, unfortunately allowing the early Manchester to fly—with some strain—into battle.

  Rolls-Royce was formed by Mr Charles Stewart Rolls and Sir Henry Royce in 1904, initially designing and manufacturing motor-car engines.

  Hastings, Wright and Glueck describe cases of Functional Symptoms owing to Combat Flying; ‘which are precipitated or caused by the stress of combat flying … occurring individuals who have little or no previous history of personality maladjustment and have been regarded as average or normal until they began combat flying. These conditions tend to be cumulative …’.

  Hair and nails do appear to lengthen after death, an illusion caused by the skin shrinking.

  Wilkes: dicken (or dickon) was ‘an expression of disbelief or rejection’; a bloke is a man; grouse is ‘excellent or outstanding’ and a galah is ‘an ass, a nincompoop’ (based on the galah’s often daft behaviour); so ‘I can’t believe I was such an extraordinary idiot’, might be a fair translation.

  English teeth are appalling due to the lack of fluoride in the water (and, in the 1930s, toothpaste; the editor’s father used coal dust).

  The Polish Resistance (Armia Krajowa) timed their rebellion to free Warsaw from the Nazis as the Russians approached, but the Russians stopped, refusing to enter the city or provide assistance. The Nazis crushed the Polish rebellion (extremely hazardous supply drops from the RAF had little effect).The Russians let the Nazis destroy the city and its people before they entered. ‘Bombing Moscow’ is a common mid-40s to mid-50s sentiment. General George Patton expressed this view in public, embarrassing the US government; his death now appears suspicious (one theory being that the Russians assassinated him in ‘self-protection’).

  Six

  Wanganui; Musical Wanganui was blind sky marking by Oboe-equipped aircraft. Wind could blow the flares away, forcing more markers to be dropped while the Master Bomber issued instructions.

  Ollis flew on this raid on 11 March 1945; the last raid to hit Essen, it paralysed the area. Allied troops entered shortly after, to minimal resistance. Of the 12/13 March 1943 raid on Essen, Goebbels recorded ‘things simply cannot go on like this’.

  Dyson: ‘My analysis was based on complete records [and] my conclusion was unambiguous: the decrease of loss rate with experience which existed in 1942 had ceased to exist in 1944 … The disappearance of the correlation between experience and loss rate ought to have been recognized by Bomber Command as a warning signal, telling us that we were up against something new.’ In Men of Air. The Doomed Youth of Bomber Command (2007), Kevin Wilson demonstrates the wide difference between the average loss rate and that when a raid goes horribly awry, as on the Magdeburg raid 21/22 January 1944. Middlebrook and Everitt’s figures concur, the total loss rate of 6.9 percent (58 aircraft) for the entire Magdeburg raid, while the Halifax loss rate was 15.6 percent (35 aircraft).

  Wanne Eickel was bombed many times; Ollis flew on the 9 November 1944 raid. Pathfinder flares vanished into a huge cloud which reared 20,000 feet over the target. The Master Bomber instructed the bombers to bomb any buildings; as Wanne Eickel sustained little damage in this raid the bombs fell more or less indiscriminately around the Ruhr.

  The ‘new Messerschmitt rocket fighter’ implies this is the Me 163 Komet, but the fighter was more likely to have been the more common German jet fighter, the Me 262—the two were often confused.

  It was not unusual for a wife of a member of aircrew to commit suicide, and it was several decades before cars were installed with self-sealing petrol tanks. Built under licence by Packard, American Merlin engines were identical to British Merlins. Lancaster B-Is used Rolls-Royce Merlin 20, 22 or 24s; Lancaster B-IIIs used Packard Merlins (of either type 28 or 38); from the outside, a B-I looked like a B-III. Of the minor modifications to the B-III, the only difference which could lead to an unexpected crash was that the Packard Merlins used Bendix Stromberg ‘pressure-injection’ carburettors, necessitating the inclusion of ‘slow-running cut-off switches’ in the cockpit.

  Seven

  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar: ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates:/ The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

  Ollis is describing a spiv. To a seedy, unsophisticated man Pernod (a French aperitif) seems exotic and sophisticated so, wanting to look sophisticated, he drinks it at night.

  For example, the raid against seven German Troop positions facing the 3rd Canadian Division during the battle to close the Falaise Gap on 14 August 1944. The Master Bomber systematically guided the force through the seven targets. The 12th Canadian Field Regiment used yellow marker flares which the bombers mistook for their own markers; seventy aircraft bombed the flares. Men were killed and injured, weapons and transport was also hit.

  Otter states that 460 Squadron ‘was to lose more than 800 aircrew’ while at Binbrook. 460 flew an astounding 5,700 Lancaster sorties—the most operations by any squadron on one type of aircraft—for the loss of 140 aircraft. The ‘night of 18 August [1943,] saw one of the most riotous parties of the year on Cleethorpes Pier, so riotous in fact that the … Mayor … wrote to Wing Commander Edwards to tell him his men were no longer welcome in the town!’

  Cost and work factors were beginning to over-rule humanitarian factors. Chuck Yeager remembers; ‘Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall our fighter group received orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort. Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved … It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it …’ (Yeager and Janos, Yeager. An Autobiography, 1985). Ollis did not intend us to think that 460’s Lanc had spotted the ammunition dump before unloading on the quiet village, but that it was lucky to hit a legitimate target. Although Bomber Command policy at this time involved ‘targets of convenience’ when the main target was inappropriate, Ollis’s point is that you can’t trust how an enemy appears.

  Kroonstad Press was a popular Dutch newspaper; van Rijn is Rembrandt’s surname.

  Eight

  Not the case; German aircraft factories were producing hundreds of fighters but, with factories, the transportation network and the oil manufacturing plants being destroyed, there were many pilots but not enough aviation fuel. Bomber Command’s bureaucracy (not just Harris) miscalculated far too early in the war; a determined, combined offensive against oil, transportation and aircraft factories might have brought Germany to a halt much earlier. However, as Harris famously observed, trying to win a war by bombing the enemy ‘has never been tried before, and we shall see.’

  Ollis did not go on this raid, but bombers colliding was not uncommon—surviving such a near-miss showed remarkable skill and a coolness under pressure from the pilot(s).

  The Admiral Scheer was sunk at Kiel on 9/10 April 1945. After fighting the Russians since November 1944, the ship’s guns were dangerously worn and her last captain, Ernst-Ludwig Thienemann, had put in to Kiel for replacement and repair. This raid also damaged the Emden and Admiral Hipper. The captain who, obeying orders, shelled the Spanish town of Almeria on 31 May 1937 was Wilhelm Marschall (1886–1976). His autobiography has so far not been published in English.

  Joe may be partly based on ‘Joe Lightfoot posted N/F, sick, with twenty-six completed’.

  Nine

  Ollis nails the special nastiness about the ending of the war. For sheer unnecessary tragedy, Renaut: ‘Just before I left Scampton [in early 1946] there was a horrible accident. The aircrew who were mostly unemployed, were put on to cleaning out the flight offices on the first floor of the hangars. A gang of aircrew were busy cleaning the linoleum floor with buckets of petrol and some fool said: ‘I know how to dry it out’, and before anyone could stop him he struck a match and the whole floor caught fire
in a minor explosion. The aircrew were burned to death, overcome by flames and suffocation in seconds. It seemed to me such a senseless tragedy to die like that after having survived an operational tour …’

  ‘Ours not to reason why …’ is from the well-known poem The Charge of the Light Brigade by Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson, which eulogises the heroic sacrifice of a brigade of British cavalry.

  ‘For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes/This vault a feasting presence full of light’. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare portrays their love as mad and dangerous, not romantic. In his own copy, Ollis underlined two lines further down; ‘Shall I believe/ That unsubstantial Death is amorous’… ominous given the manner of Ollis’s own death.

  Apart from Harris’ Bomber Offensive, 101 Nights is one of the first books to discuss the pivotal significance of the 13/14 February 1945 Dresden raid, now the subject of numerous books and documentaries. By then almost every major city in Germany lay in ruins and Auschwitz had been captured by the Red Army. Predating Russia’s request for huge raids at Yalta, ‘Operation Thunderclap’ had been planned as a series of raids to break down the organisation and administration of the German war economy, to be delivered at a critical point in the Allied advance. As the Allies moved into Germany, more distant targets like Stuttgart and Dresden could be approached and the Luftwaffe more easily avoided. The Combined Strategic Targets Committee issued Harris with a directive ‘listing ten towns from the East and for military transportation on the Eastern Front’ (Probert). Berlin was first; Dresden second. Harris: ‘by this time [Dresden was] the main centre of communications for the defence of Germany on the southern half of the Eastern Front’; the raids were also intended to block German reinforcements heading toward the Russians, and were linked to Churchill’s fear that Russia’s armies would surge southwards to take most of western Europe. The Allies expected the Russians to halt their drive into Europe in deference to the refugees, but the Russians ploughed on regardless, indifferent to the mass of refugees, ‘… Soviet tank columns simply crushed any refugee farm carts in the way and raked them with machine gun fire. When a detachment of tank troops overtook a refugee column on 19 January, ‘the passengers on the carts and vehicles were butchered’.’ (Beevor, Berlin. The Downfall 1945 (2002). ‘In the three months of the air battle of eastern Europe we lost 780 men and facilitated the Red Army’s savage advance to Berlin. This is my regret about Dresden: that it helped the Russians establish themselves deep inside Europe with appalling ferocity, and prevented the very balance of power that we had fought to restore’ (Musgrove). McKee, a soldier who saw the devastating effects of area bombing and wrote the second major work on Dresden; ‘The difference between these few fire-blitzed streets [in English cities] and a great city which has been almost totally destroyed is titanic, and not to be apprehended by the intellect; it is a matter of emotion. And yet the survivors in the fire-stormed cities of Germany, which had been between 75 and 95% erased from the earth, spoke after the war of what happened in Dresden as if it had been infinitely worse.’ The first major work on Dresden was the detailed but seriously flawed David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden. The repositioning of the Dresden raid in the public’s imaginative zeitgeist on both sides of the Atlantic reached a peak with Kurt Vonnegut’s bestseller, Slaughterhouse 5, which seems to be where the spark of anti-Bomber Command revisionism in the 1980s and 1990s was lit. Ollis did not take part, but he seems to be the first to nail ‘the problem of Dresden’.