In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school –
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
Most young men conscripted for war service wanted to fly, but few achieved their aspirations. Air forces picked only the brightest and fittest adolescents for probable death. RAF navigator Ken Owen, a Welshman, said, ‘Perhaps a quarter of our sixth form at Pontypridd grammar school became aircrew; more than half of them were killed.’ Yet those accepted for flying duties exulted in their status as an elite: they received a popular adulation unmatched by any other breed of warrior.
In the first year of Britain’s war, circumstances forced the RAF to rush new pilots into the line, sometimes with no more than twenty or thirty hours’ experience of the planes they flew in combat. Thereafter, however, the British and Americans trained aircrew requiring the highest skills – pilots and navigators – for up to two years before committing them to action. Instructors ‘washed out’ many candidates, but despite intensive tuition, wartime pilots often killed themselves because their skills were inadequate to handle high-performance aircraft, even before engaging the enemy. Youth and the mood of the times encouraged recklessness. In the course of the war, the RAF lost in non-operational accidents 787 officers and 4,540 other ranks killed, 396 officers and 2,717 other ranks injured. Among US aircrew of all services, 13,000 died accidentally. Taking off and landing a fighter, designed to be inherently unstable, required meticulous care. Misjudgement was often punished by death – in the first two years of the war 1,500 Luftwaffe trainees were killed learning to fly the Bf109. Managing a bomber was little easier, especially if it suffered a technical mishap.
An aspect of the conflict common to warriors in all three dimensions was that navigation was a life-or-death science. A British Army training report noted that soldiers would forgive almost any fault in their officers except incompetent map-reading, which at best wasted energy and at worst got them killed. Ships were sunk by straying carelessly into minefields. Airmen who lost their way, especially over the sea, often died when their fuel ran out. Anti-submarine patrol duty, roaming far out over empty oceans, was a wearisome task, demanding special navigational care: errors killed as many crews as enemy action or mechanical failure. Even when electronic aids and beacons were introduced, a dismaying number of planes fell into the sea because inexpert airmen flew reciprocal courses, or were unable to fix their positions in poor weather.
The Germans, Italians and Japanese entered the conflict with highly trained pilots, and until 1942 most of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were superior to those of the RAF or USAAF; the Japanese and Italians also had some good types. ‘With the start the Germans had, it was a miracle we ever caught up,’ said British bomber group commander Edward Addison. The Luftwaffe’s close support for the Wehrmacht was a key factor in German victories between 1939 and 1942. Goering’s squadrons failed, however, as a strategic bomber force. Before the blitz on Britain, senior airmen of most nations were imbued with a mystical faith. They deluded themselves that societies would succumb to panic in the face of the mere fact of assault from the air; moral collapse would provoke industrial disintegration, and thus defeat. The destruction of Guernica by the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, along with the bombing of Nanjing, Warsaw and Rotterdam, promoted delusions about the vulnerability of civilian populations. More protracted experience disproved these, however. ‘[A] vital lesson – one that has taken even air specialists by surprise,’ wrote Major Alexander Seversky, a leading American air strategist, in 1942,
relates to the behaviour of civilian populations under air punishment. It had been generally assumed that aerial bombardment would quite quickly shatter popular morale … The progress of this war has tended to indicate that this expectation was unfounded. On the contrary, it now seems clear that despite large casualties and impressive physical destruction, civilians can ‘take it’. On the whole, indeed, armed forces have been more quickly demoralised by air power than unarmed city dwellers. These facts are significant beyond their psychological interest. They mean that haphazard destruction of cities … is costly and wasteful in relation to the tactical results obtained. Attacks will increasingly be concentrated on military rather than on random human targets. Unplanned vandalism from the air must give way, more and more, to planned, predetermined destruction.
Bombers achieved results only in proportion to the weight of explosives they could drop accurately on designated targets; mass was critical. The Luftwaffe and the Japanese air forces had formidable capabilities for supporting their respective ground forces and navies, as well as for killing refugees and promoting terror, but their aircraft carried small bombloads. The Luftwaffe inflicted pain and destruction during the 1940–41 blitz on Britain, but nowhere near sufficient to make a decisive impact on the ability of Churchill’s nation to continue the war. Thereafter, Germany’s air force suffered a steady decline: when the first generation of Axis airmen was killed off, training of their successors languished. Both the Germans and the Japanese made a critical strategic mistake, to which fuel famine contributed, by failing to allocate resources to sustain a flow of proficient pilots. By 1944–45, Axis flying skills had become markedly inferior to those of their American and British counterparts. The Russians displayed the same ruthlessness in training and expending aircrew as in everything else. By 1943 they had some good aircraft and able pilots, but their technology was less advanced, and they suffered savage losses.
In the second half of the war, the Western Allies produced superb planes in vast numbers, but the Germans introduced only two good new types – the Focke-Wulf 190 and the revolutionary Me 262 jet fighter. Numbers of the latter were too small and pilot skills inadequate to avert the Luftwaffe’s eclipse in the sky. The Japanese Zero, which so daunted the Allies in 1941– 42, became wholly outclassed. It has been described as ‘an origami aircraft’ – light, graceful, superbly manoeuvrable, but frail and offering negligible concessions to pilot safety, for instance lacking cockpit armour. Commander David McCampbell, the US Navy’s top-scoring air ace of the war, said: ‘We learned very early that if you hit them near the wing roots, where the fuel was, they would explode right in your face.’ The Japanese army and naval air forces posed no significant challenge to the Allies in 1944–45 except through kamikaze attacks, an expedient of desperation.
Allied aircrew, once deployed on operational fighter or bomber squadrons, until the last eighteen months of the war confronted a statistical probability of their own extinction. Romantic delusions faded as they learned to anticipate a destiny as a bloody jam of crushed flesh and bones, or surmounting a petrol-fuelled funeral pyre. To be sure, their daily lives on the ground were privileged; they were spared the mud and discomfort to which foot soldiers were subjected. But they were less likely to survive; Ernie Pyle wrote: ‘A man approached death rather decently in the air force. He died well-fed and clean-shaven.’
More than half the RAF’s heavy bomber crews perished, 56,000 men in all. The USAAF’s overall losses were lower, but among 100,000 of its men who participated in the strategic offensive against Germany some 26,000 died, and a further 20,000 were taken prisoner. ‘You were resigned to dying every night,’ said a British Whitley bomber pilot, Sid Bufton. ‘Before setting out you looked around your room: golf clubs, books, nice little radio – and the letter to your parents propped up on the table.’ Unsurprisingly, Allied casualties were proportionately heaviest when the Axis dominated the war, and fell steadily once the tide turned. From 1943 onwards, it was the turn of German and Japanese airmen to do most of the dying: less than 10 per cent survived until the end.
The Allied air chiefs’ principal preoccupation was strategic assault on Germany – the offensive against Japan began in earnest only in March 1945 – by which they aspired to win the war on their own. The RAF was obliged to abandon daylight bombing after a bloody initiation in 1939–40. Thereaf
ter, its squadrons mounted a night offensive, which made little material impact on Germany until 1943: they lacked mass as well as navigational and bomb-aiming skills. The first British bombs which fell on Berlin at the end of August 1940 inflicted only random damage, though they shocked the capital’s inhabitants and killed a few civilians. One young mother retired to a shelter when the warning sirens sounded, but was reluctant to disturb her two sleeping children, whom she left in bed: they perished when the house received a direct hit. After that story was published, Berliners took more heed of sirens.
An RAF squadron commander described Bomber Command’s early operations over Germany as ‘groping’. This was exemplified by the experience of Sgt. Bill Uprichard, who flew a Whitley of 51 Squadron on a mission against oil refineries at Politz on the Baltic in poor weather on the night of 29 November 1940. Outbound, after spending 2½ hours in thick cloud over the North Sea, suddenly the sky opened to reveal a brilliantly-lit city below. Uprichard and his crew realised they must be passing neutral Sweden, and hastily reset their course. They blind-bombed Politz by dead-reckoning – estimating their own time over target – then turned for home in impenetrable cloud. Without warning they found themselves facing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Uprichard wrote:
I woke up! The wind had been stronger than I thought and we were flying a course taking us straight over the heavily defended Friesian Islands. We crossed the North Sea still in cloud and it was difficult to get a pinpoint on anything. I spent a lot of time – probably too much – flying up and along the Yorkshire coast hoping to see a break. It was raining heavily … By this time our fuel was very low – only about 20 mins. left – so for the first time I put out an emergency signal PAN-PAN-PAN and in two ticks Linton-on-Ouse came up with a magnetic course. We were then on the verge of abandoning the aircraft. It was a matter of a long time-glide home. We made it, but the refuelling party told me we had virtually nothing left in the tanks.
Throughout 1940–41, naïveté persisted within the RAF about the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s operations. ‘The briefings were very, very good,’ said Ken Owen, a nineteen-year-old navigator. ‘They made us feel we were going to hit an important target, doing important damage to the Germans. And of course we all listened to the BBC bulletins next morning, which trumpeted our success; there was a tremendous amount of self-delusion. We thought we were knocking hell out of them. Maybe twelve times [out of thirty “trips”] I think we bombed the right place; otherwise it was either the wrong place or ploughed fields.’
Despite the limited impact of the strategic air offensive in its early years, most of the RAF’s leaders retained a visionary faith not only in what bombing might do, but also in what it had already accomplished. In September 1942, Air Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman wrote to Britain’s air chief Sir Charles Portal complaining of the extravagant claims made by some commanders: ‘In their efforts to attract the limelight they sometimes exaggerate and even falsify facts. The worst offender is C-in-C Bomber Command.’ Freeman cited claims published in the media about the achievements of some recent raids on Germany: ‘The damage at [Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf] is described as fantastic. I believe this to be untrue … I suggest that you might … send a circular letter to commanders-in-chief … impressing on them the need to adhere strictly to the unvarnished truth in accounts of operations … I am alarmed about the effect which the present tendencies must shortly have on the good name of the R.A.F.’
But, during the long years before Western Allied armies engaged the Germans in strength, it suited not only the air chiefs, but also Britain’s prime minister and America’s president, to collude in proclaiming the triumphs of bombing. Sir Arthur Harris, who became Bomber Command’s C-in-C in February 1942, said: ‘Winston’s attitude to bombing was “Anything to put up a show.” If we hadn’t [used Bomber Command] we would only have had the U-boat war, and as he said, defence of our trade routes was not an instrument of war.’ Churchill regarded the bomber offensive as a vital weapon in Western relations with Stalin, in some small degree assuaging the Soviet warlord’s bitterness about alleged Anglo-American sluggishness in launching a second front.
Ken Owen flew his first 1942 trip, to Kassel, in a mood of euphoria. ‘I was in a daze. It was sheer excitement – the briefing, sitting in the aircraft preparing for take-off. There was bright moonlight. We found the target – and plenty of flak. I was far more scared on the second “op”. My feet were cold, I was sweating under my arms. It didn’t take long for two kinds of reputations to be established: first, there were the “gen crews” – the real “press-on types”; then there were the ones who didn’t like it at all. Two or three were voted most likely to get the chop, some because they were so frightened they were likely to do something stupid … One or two pilots were shit-scared; one or two gunners froze in their turrets. Sometimes people got the chop because of a terrible lack of discipline in their crews.’
Aircrew became intimately familiar with the stench of hot rubber and petrol in the planes, sometimes also of cordite from their hammering guns and vomit from frightened men. Several times, Owen’s wireless operator threw up as the aircraft took violent evasive action. ‘If you were coned [by searchlights], you’d fly towards somebody else in the hope they’d pick them up instead of you. There was a tremendous element of cynicism and callousness – “Thank Christ it’s someone else.” I honestly can’t remember the names of many of the men who got the chop. They were only there about a fortnight. We were quite slow to realise that flying was becoming a dangerous occupation; that element of excitement kept us going, and morale was high. There were problems, of course, but I never blamed higher authority because I felt that we were all learning together.’
The intimacy of the relationships between members of bomber crews is a cliché, but was by no means universally valid. B-24 navigator Harold Dorfman respected his pilot’s skill, but ‘we hated each other … After a row on a training flight, we never talked to each other except about the mission.’ Jack Brennan, from Staten Island, was twenty-one when he joined the air force, to his family’s fury. ‘“We could have kept you out,” they said. But I was one of the kids who wanted to be a hero.’ The experience of flying twenty-four missions against Germany with an incompetent and cowardly pilot cured him of such delusions. ‘All the time, I wished I had gone into something else. We got hit almost every trip. The only good thing was that we had decent living conditions compared with the guys on the ground.’ His crew’s combat experience ended ingloriously, when the pilot persuaded them to parachute over Sweden while on a mission to Berlin. Brennan was one of three survivors, and he revelled in the comfort and safety of his subsequent experience as an internee: ‘It was like a summer camp.’
The nature of life and death on bomber stations discouraged relationships outside a man’s own crew. ‘If you had losses to the degree we had losses, you didn’t get terribly attached to people,’ said Etienne Maze, who flew RAF Halifaxes. ‘They came and they went. By the time you had done ten “ops”, you were a very old boy.’ On the day Ted Bone saw some acquaintances on a ‘missing’ list, he merely recorded in his diary: ‘Good bods Pyatt, Donner etc. Cleaned bike, wrote home, had crumpets and cocoa for supper in the billet.’ An American B-17 crewman wrote: ‘We learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago, as simply as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for another.’
Bomber operations imposed unique stresses upon participants, who knew the odds against surviving a ‘tour’. They boarded their planes at calm, well-regulated bases; flew out into the whitest heat of war over Europe; landed back amid the fields of Norfolk or Lincolnshire; visited the pub among local yokels the following evening; then did it all again two or three days later. Pilots, especially on night operations, enjoyed considerable personal latitude which they could exercise for good or ill. Most displayed remarkable determination and devotion to duty, but some faltered. Air Vice-Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, 5 Group’s commander, personally interviewed one pilot who turned for hom
e when approaching Hamburg: the man offered as his only excuse that he found his aircraft drifting away from the main ‘stream’. This man told the group commander the crew had discussed their choices over the intercom and agreed to abandon the mission. ‘When I asked him why he, as captain, didn’t take the decision, he replied that they were all members of the sergeants’ mess, and it was their lives as well as his, so obviously he had to consult them.’
Ron Crafter, an electronic counter-measures operator aboard a Halifax, was hit in the face by shell splinters during an attack on V1 launching sites in June 1944. ‘The wounds were superficial, but I panicked. I have since found it rather difficult to live with – the most important moment of my life and I was found wanting. I have tried to convince myself that as I was only nineteen it was excusable.’ So it was, of course. A significant minority of expensively trained aircrew, after suffering such experiences, failed to complete their tours. The spirits of many reached their lowest ebb in the winter of 1943, during the RAF’s so-called ‘Battle of Berlin’. ‘Thirty sorties in an operational tour, with a loss rate of 4 per cent, was near the limit of human endurance … It was clear that morale was bad,’ Ralph Cochrane acknowledged.
Many men who flinched were treated with considerable harshness, because their superiors feared that indulgence would promote emulation. Reg Raynes was a wireless operator, sole survivor of a Hampden that crashed on a Norfolk beach in 1941 after returning badly shot-up from Berlin: ‘I clearly remember the complete silence as we went down. Both engines were gone and the rest of the crew never spoke.’ His next memory was of finding himself at a psychiatric hospital at Matlock in Derbyshire, from whence he was posted back to a bomber station, automatically demoted in rank. ‘I was unfit for flying duties, and no one seemed to know what to do with me. All they could see was a Wop/air gunner walking about in a rather aimless manner, and I don’t think they ever realised I was mentally ill.’
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