Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story

by Simon Leighton-Porter

  The lack of survival instinct in some of the crews amazed me. Aircraft in the lower height bands of the bomber stream were creating vapour trails in the clear night sky, ghostly white fingers pointing the way for waiting German fighters. Their gunners or even the pilots themselves must have noticed, but appeared not to realise what deadly peril it put them in even when Lancasters and Halifaxes were falling all around them.

  I had other ideas. By climbing at maximum continuous revs and boost, Boyle and I managed to coax O-Orange to a safer 24,000 feet, well above our briefed height, but where we left no tell-tale contrails to betray our presence. After Venlo, the stream turned onto a southerly heading, the Bomber Command route planners hoping to fool the German fighter controllers into thinking that tonight’s target was Monchengladbach or even Cologne.

  When we made our final turn towards the target there was no longer any need for Hudson to navigate. Ahead of us, Dusseldorf was a cauldron of target markers, flame and what looked like a solid red curtain of flak bursts over the city. Searchlight beams, blue and white, crisscrossed the sky as they sought out prey for the gunners. Above the flak bursts, fighter flares drifted down, silhouetting the lumbering bombers for the Luftwaffe night fighter crews. Just ahead and to the right an orange glow blossomed into an oily fireball, the funeral pyre of yet another crew.

  Peters’ voice came over the intercom. ‘Christ, we’re not going into that, are we, skipper?’

  ‘Well, the rest of us are,’ I replied. ‘If you don’t fancy it, you can get out and walk. Opening bomb doors now and descending. Bomb aimer, let me know when you have a positive ident of the aiming point.’ A flak burst somewhere under the aircraft buffeted us, but without causing any apparent damage.

  Four minutes into our target run there was still no word from the bomb aimer. Then at last, ‘Th- th- thirty seconds to release, keep her steady,’ Peters sounded as though he was on the verge of tears.

  ‘Do you have the aiming point?’

  Silence.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, man, can you see the aiming point?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir,’ came the quavering reply.

  I’d had enough. ‘Make switches safe, bomb aimer. I’m closing the bomb doors and we’re going round again. And we’ll keep going round until you pull yourself together and do your job properly.’ I knew I was being cruel to Peters by making an example of him in front of the others. Had I been less sure of my own temporary immortality, I would probably have been happy for him to drop the bombs somewhere within the urban area of Dusseldorf and then get the hell out as quickly as possible. Feigning courage like this was the worst form of dishonesty and I shudder when I look back on it. Events have paid me back a hundredfold for what I did that night – but more of that later.

  ‘Navigator, give me a heading back to the run-in point.’

  ‘Steer 315 for now skipper, I’m already working on a more accurate heading.’

  For all his lack of charisma, Hudson was a bloody sharp navigator. Flying’s like that to an experienced aviator – you can tell who the good guys are pretty much straight away. Boyle clearly knew his stuff too, but Peters was a liability. As for the two gunners and Wells the wireless op, I hadn’t really seen enough to form an opinion.

  Hudson’s monotone broke my reverie. ‘New heading, skipper. Steer three two five, that’ll set us up two miles offset from the run in point to allow for the radius of turn. Five minutes twenty on that heading… Bomb aimer, give me a bomb-sight drift reading,’ he added.

  Peters’ reply was barely audible. ‘Ch- checking now.’

  It was all I could do to restrain myself from climbing out of my seat, going down into the nose of the aircraft and throwing Peters out of the escape hatch. Helping the nav by using the bomb-sight to estimate wind speed, and hence the aircraft’s drift, should have been second nature to him.

  ‘I think I can see the lakes to the west of Kempen,’ Peters said. ‘The sight’s giving me a wind velocity of 350 degrees, 55 knots. Estimating 345/50 at bombing altitude.’

  Thank Christ for that, I thought, the dozy bugger’s doing his job at last. To the west, I could see the glinting ribbon of what had to be the river Maas and beyond it, a pall of smog which marked the Dutch city of Venlo.

  ‘Turn starboard now,’ said Hudson. ‘New heading 130.’

  Once more, we were face to face with the inferno. Even though I knew we would come to no harm, fear gripped every ounce of my being. What it must have been like for Peters, alone in O-Orange’s nose with his god’s-eye view of the storm of high explosive and steel, I shuddered to imagine.

  ‘I can see the harbour, skipper,’ said Peters, his voice now firm and confident. ‘Come port three, roll out 127 degrees. Steady, steady...’ An eternity of waiting and then, ‘Bombs gone, skipper!’

  Freed of nearly six tons of ordnance, the Lancaster soared upwards. I held the nose down and waited the agonising thirty seconds for the photoflash to go off – if we didn’t bring home a target photo, there was every chance that our efforts would not be counted against the allotted tally of thirty ops.

  I reached my left hand down and pulled up the handle to close the bomb doors. No sooner had I done so than the whole aircraft was lit up brighter than day. We had been ‘coned’ and in an instant it felt like every searchlight in Dusseldorf was pointed our way. I pushed all four throttles wide open and overbanked, pulling the nose hard down until we were almost in the vertical. The glare was so bright that I couldn’t even read the airspeed indicator, but I realised we must be close to the limit. Below us, Dusseldorf was ablaze from end to end and the thought of what its inhabitants might do to us if my confidence in our invulnerability was misplaced didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Help me pull her out,’ I said, grunting under the g-forces forcing me down into my seat. Somehow I managed to get both feet on the instrument panel for more leverage, and with Boyle’s help we managed to get the wings level on what I hoped was a northerly heading. At that point the searchlights lost us and I saw to my horror that we were at only 3,000 feet and doing over 400 knots, 100 knots faster than the aircraft’s limit. If I really was the cat whose nine lives ran out on the 29th of March, I must have used eight of them getting away from those searchlights and I could feel the cooling sweat trickling down my spine. None of the crew spoke.

  Fizzing with adrenalin and endorphins, I decided to show them I was on top of things. ‘Right, that’s half the job done. Gunners, keep your eyes peeled. Watch out for fighters creeping up underneath us.’

  I had read the history books and knew all about the Luftwaffe’s upward-firing Schräge Musik canons that were scything their way through the ranks of Bomber Command. The tactic was brutally simple – approach the bomber from below, keeping in the gunners’ blind spot, slide into position underneath the wing (firing into the fuselage risked detonating the bomb load and immolating both hunter and hunted), fire a short burst of tracerless 20mm shells into the fuel tanks between the engines and break away before the victim knew what had hit him. Tragically, the RAF did not discover the truth about Schräge Musik until after the war.

  I kept the aircraft low, skimming over occupied Belgium and France at 2,500 feet. Just below us was a solid blanket of cloud, perfect cover if we got jumped by a fighter. The crew remained silent, whether from a professional aversion to idle chat or struck dumb by fear I knew not.

  Eventually, Hudson’s voice crackled over the roar of the engines. ‘Getting a radar paint on the coast, skipper. We’re on track. Maintain this heading for now.’

  As we reached the coast, I began a gentle climb to 12,000 feet and followed Hudson’s instructions to turn right onto a northerly heading for base. Britain was still under blackout conditions and as we crossed the Thames at Reading, the cloud cover broke up allowing me a view of a country seemingly devoid of all human life except for the odd cluster of lights which marked the airfields open as diversions for bombers too badly damaged or too short of fuel to make it home. Here and
there, bright, blueish-white columns rising vertically into the night sky marked the presence of the “Darky” searchlights that were used to guide stricken aircraft to one of these safe havens.

  Heading further north and east the little patches of light grew so densely packed that in places they seemed to overlap, and as we got lower I could make out the navigation lights of hundreds of bombers waiting their turn to land, circling round each bright patch like moths around countless flames. Soon, it was our turn and I eased O-Orange into a gentle left bank to join the downwind leg of our approach, lowered the gear and flap and then followed the Drem lights in a curving descent to the runway threshold at Leckonby.

  At our dispersal the same WAAF driver who had driven us from the ops block what seemed like a lifetime ago, was waiting for us with her Bedford truck. ‘Welcome back, sir,’ she said. ‘Hope you had a good trip.’

  ‘Yes, it was ok I suppose,’ I replied. We might as well have been chatting about a day trip to Skegness. The others said nothing, the two gunners drawing deeply on their first cigarettes of the new day.

  As one of the first crews to return, we didn’t have to wait long for our debriefing. The shiny-faced Flight Lieutenant was there, fussing around the trestle tables as we gulped our hot tea, strongly laced with rum.

  And then, it was over. After all the hours of tension waiting for the green flare, the knotted stomachs full of butterflies, the surreal horror of watching bombers falling in flames while Dusseldorf burned beneath us and the anxious hours of the homeward leg where every shadow became a prowling night fighter, we were summarily dismissed to our beds. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

  Two nights later we were back on ops. Once more, the nervous wait in the blue, smoky haze of the briefing room for the CO’s arrival. Then the gasps as he drew back the curtain – this time the line of red ribbon seemed to go on for ever. Whitebait. The Big City. Berlin. For once there were no muttered curses, just a collective intake of breath at what was to come and the certain knowledge that some of us wouldn’t be coming back.

  Over one hundred silent prayers went up unheeded into the void. Please, God, let it be some other crew tonight, please let me live – three crews had failed to return to Leckonby from Dusseldorf – the law of averages meant that of the twenty-one men in the aircraft shot down that night, two – probably bomb aimers – would have survived. None of the grey, frightened faces gave voice to the unspoken prayer, but its effect was almost audible.

  As with the Dusseldorf raid, I knew we would come through unscathed, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened that night. From landfall over occupied Denmark, all the way to the target and back, oily smears of orange fire across the night sky marked the funeral pyres of Bomber Command’s young men. Even over the target itself, the night fighters continued to snap and tear at the bomber stream. Fighter flares dropped to illuminate us made it seem as though we were flying along a well-lit highway – slow-moving, fat black insects, inching their way across a floodlit tablecloth. Instinctively, I hunched myself up in the seat in a futile attempt to make myself a smaller target for when the inevitable happened. In the glare of an exploding bomber about a mile away to our left I saw the silhouettes of two parachutes. Given the stories of what Berlin’s civilians did to downed airmen – we’d all heard the rumours of bomber crews hanged from lamp-posts – I shuddered at the thought of what might await them.

  Berlin, as usual, was covered by eight-eighths cloud and the bombing accuracy was correspondingly sporadic. We’d been warned that the Germans lit decoy fires to draw bombers away from their targets, but with the Pathfinders’ marker flares widely scattered and drifting downwind at over 100 knots, we picked what we hoped was the right one and as soon as the photoflash had gone off – no doubt showing that we’d bombed some pinpricks of light, somewhere above solid cloud – I swung the aircraft hard round to the right and held a westerly heading to make good our escape from the hornets’ nest beneath.

  Then it happened. A rapid series of bangs that I felt as much as heard, as though someone was attacking the aircraft with a pneumatic drill. ‘Corkscrew port, skipper.’ Chester’s voice from the rear turret rose to a scream. I banked hard left and pulled the nose down below the horizon, hoping to turn into the threat and thus spoiling the night fighter’s aim. O-Orange responded sluggishly to the controls – we’d been hit hard.

  ‘Gunners, can you see him?’ I grunted, struggling against the g forces that pinned me into the seat and made my head and arms feel like lumps of lead.

  Sergeant Chester’s voice came over the intercom. ‘No, skipper. Keep turning, the bastard can’t be far away.’

  With difficulty, I rolled the wings level, reduced the power and eased the Lancaster out of the dive. We were now heading back towards Berlin and I needed almost full right rudder to keep the aircraft straight. ‘Check starboard down,’ I said, standing our long-suffering O-Orange on its starboard wingtip.

  ‘Nothing seen,’ replied both gunners, almost in chorus.

  ‘Port outer’s on fire, skipper. Feathering it now.’ To my right, Sgt Boyle, the flight engineer was a blur of activity as he closed the port outer throttle, pressed and held the feathering button at the bottom of his console, switched off the engine’s magnetos, leaned over the throttle quadrant to shut the left engine master cock and then reached down for the fire extinguisher button. I chanced a nervous glance to my left. The fire seemed to be out but we were still a long way from home with no idea how much precious fuel we might be losing from our damaged left wing. Temporary immortality was all very well, but this was bloody frightening.

  Chester’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Rear turret’s U/S, skipper.’ Losing the port outer engine had robbed us of hydraulic power to the rear turret. ‘Roger that. Keep your eyes peeled,’ I replied.

  With only three serviceable engines we were unable to maintain height and so began a weary trudge home at 10,000 ft and 130 knots. As the white runway lights of Leckonby appeared out of the drizzle at 500 ft on the approach I felt as though we had been airborne a lifetime. Then, as we turned onto our parking slot in the pre-dawn darkness, I realised that tomorrow would be Christmas day.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Low cloud and driving sleet meant that ops were cancelled for the night of the night of the 24th of December. The glad tidings came just before lunch and, as one, everyone headed for the bars of their respective messes.

  I had just ordered a pint when a female voice caught my attention. ‘Glad to see you made it back. We were a bit worried when you were reported overdue.’ I turned to see the WAAF signals officer who had briefed us for both the Dusseldorf and Berlin raids.

  ‘Yes. It was a long flog home on three engines. The Flight Sergeant wasn’t happy – says he won’t let me use his aeroplane again if I don’t take better care of it.’

  She laughed and, hearing that welcome sound, I realised just how much I had missed female company since arriving at Leckonby – I was now twenty-four after all. I introduced myself and learned that she was called Betty Clark and had been studying classics at Newnham College, Cambridge before the war interrupted her studies and she had volunteered to serve in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

  ‘So how does being a whizz at Latin and Greek help with signals?’ I asked.

  That tinkling laugh again. ‘Everybody asks me that. Teleprinters, Morse, wireless, R/T they’re just languages, that’s all. Same as Latin or Greek.’

  Intrigued, I let her do most of the talking. A solid, horsey, Home Counties background, public school and a scholarship to read classics. Way out of my league, of course, but I was flattered that she was taking the time to talk to me and was secretly amused at some of the envious glances our conversation was attracting from the other officers in the room. What was it Hudson had said about many being called but none chosen? Could I really be that lucky?

  ‘It’s Christmas Day tomorrow,’ Betty said.

  ‘Bit of a long way to go to play football a
gainst Jerry between the trenches,’ I replied.

  ‘No, it’s not that. You see there’s a dance on at the Assembly Rooms in Lincoln tonight. Frank Dey and his orchestra – I hear they’re awfully good.’ Then she paused. ‘You do dance, don’t you?’ I nodded and she continued, eyes looking down as though embarrassed. ‘I know this must sound awfully forward seeing as we’ve only just met, but you see, there’s a whole gang of us going and we’re a man short. Would you like to come?’

  ‘You mean to the dance?’

  ‘Yes of course, silly. Where did you think I meant?’ That infectious laugh again.

  ‘I’d be delighted to,’ I replied.

  We chatted for a few more minutes. Betty then left to catch up on overdue paperwork and I returned to the bar. A voice by my shoulder caused me to turn round. ‘You don’t hang about, do you?’ said one of the other B-Flight pilots, standing uncomfortably close and glaring at me.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  He gave a laugh that sounded far from friendly. ‘Muscling in like that. You’ve only been here five minutes and now you’re off dancing with the only eligible popsie for miles. Bad show, y’know.’

  I pinched him on the cheek and smiled. ‘Well, old lad, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.’ He swatted my hand away angrily. Jealousy? Too much beer? Too many nights over Berlin? I never did find out. In a few weeks he would be dead along with his entire crew.

  ***

  Later that evening, Betty and I caught the train from Leckonby Junction to Lincoln. It was packed with all ranks, eager for the bright lights and for a few hours’ welcome oblivion – a tinsel and fairy-light escape from the drabness of the fifth winter of the war.

  We half walked, half ran the few hundred yards that separated the Assembly Rooms from Lincoln station, huddling under Betty’s umbrella in a futile attempt to keep dry. For some reason we both seemed to find the episode hilarious and, giggling like maniacs, burst into the warmth and light of the foyer.