Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  Aircrew training presented its own challenges. For Bill, it was a real thrill to take to the air for the first time—that is, until the pilot ordered him to wind up the wheels. ‘There was a crank near the pilot’s seat, which needed about 600 turns to get the wheels up. Exhausted by then, I was starting to enjoy the flight when I realised that it was going to take the same number of turns to get them down again.’

  Bill had begun bombing and gunnery exercises at the end of the previous Canadian winter, when temperatures were still sub-zero. These were the kinds of conditions they could expect in battle. Bill had to sit in the mid-upper turret without heating, and with temperatures outside as low as –50°C. One day, shivering though he was, Bill suddenly had to deal with a jammed gun. This meant re-cocking the gun, but with three layers of gloves that was an almost impossible task. ‘Removing the gloves from my right hand, I pulled back the cocking lever, leaving patches of skin on it. On landing, the tips of my fingers had gone dead white, which meant they were frostbitten,’ he recalled. Recovery was extremely painful.

  Not all RAAF airmen travelled to Britain via the United States and Canada. Others, like Noel Eliot, sailed across the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal. In late August 1942, Noel and his brother Bill boarded an ex-cattle transport, the Westernland. Conditions were cramped and the atmosphere foetid. The men slept in hammocks below deck, slung so close that they were touching. Few enjoyed the journey. Inedible food was hurled through open portholes. A ‘two-up’ school ran all day on deck. ‘At night below deck you could get into just about any gambling game imaginable. There was little else to do,’ Noel said. The men were conscious of submarines and many, including Noel, took lifejackets with them to sleep on deck. The reported sighting of a corpse floating past the ship did not help his peace of mind.

  Noel knew that he was to be posted to Bomber Command. In a shipboard lecture, an RAF squadron leader delivered the cheery news that the survival rate among aircrew was ten per cent. ‘However, next day we had a lecture from another squadron leader who told us that the survival rate was twenty-five per cent, which gave us a much more happy anticipation of our longevity.’

  After leaving New York, Alf Read sailed in a 100-ship convoy for Murmansk, in Russia, and on to Britain. Alf and his fellow passengers were put ashore in Scotland to travel south by train to Bournemouth, on the English south coast. As they arrived, ‘two Messerschmitts came down with cannons and a couple of bombs, and that was our welcome to Great Britain’.

  3

  THE USUAL AWFUL ETERNITY

  William ‘Sam’ Weller knew just how dated Bomber Command’s first aircraft were. Flying in one, a twin-engined Whitley, on his first trip almost cost him his life—and the Luftwaffe played no part. Sam was a butcher and farmer from Gympie in Queensland who, as a sergeant pilot, flew Whitleys with Bomber Squadrons 102 and 158 RAF early in the war. On that first flight to Kiel, one of the major naval bases and shipbuilding centres of the German Reich,

  the pilot kept on getting me to go and do this and do that and in the end it nearly did for me. In those days the door of the Whitley opened outwards and on one journey I trod on it and it opened, and I nearly fell out. We were over the North Sea at the time and I can remember looking down and gasping, ‘My goodness.’ The pilot was complaining bitterly about the draught coming in and I am hanging on to the door and trying to close it. I had a terrible time because of the air stream pulling it open. Eventually I got it closed. Anyway, they changed it later and made it open inwards, but not before it had scared ten years off my lifetime.

  Such design deficiencies underlined the inadequacy of Bomber Command’s initial bomber fleet as it struggled to be competitive with the Luftwaffe. Until the introduction of heavy bombers, the RAF had relied upon the Fairey Battle, Bristol Blenheim, Handley Page Hampden, Vickers Wellesley, Vickers Wellington and Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, but with the exception of the Wellington, these proved too slow, had too short a range and too low a flight ceiling, and could not carry heavy payloads.

  Before the war started, the RAF issued an Operational Requirements Directive for a new heavy bomber. Short Brothers, Handley Page and Avro took up the challenge. The results were the Short Stirling, Handley Page Halifax and Avro Manchester. All three were failures, but the chief engineer at Avro, convinced he had a good airframe, turned a poor design into the highly successful Avro Lancaster. This would enter service in 1942, while the Halifax, through successive improvements to the basic design would become an able support aircraft to the Lancaster.

  With the Luftwaffe’s heavily armed fighter aircraft mauling the dated British planes, the initial British policy was to send bombers on daylight ops targeting shipping and key German military targets such as airfields, ports and bridges. The strategy failed abysmally, and was abandoned after the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam, the largest industrial target in the Netherlands, in May 1940. This was part of the German plan to occupy the Netherlands to establish air and naval bases for the forthcoming Battle of Britain. More than a thousand, 110-pound bombs and nearly 160 550-pounders were dropped on residential areas and the medieval city centre. Uncontrollable fires started, and merged into a firestorm. Nearly 1000 people were killed and 85,000 made homeless, and nearly three square kilometres of the city virtually levelled. The Netherlands capitulated soon after.

  On 15 May, the day after the attack, the War Cabinet gave the go-ahead for Bomber Command to cross the Rhine river and target the German heartland. The decision marked a turning point for Bomber Command, allowing it to attack strategically important industrial targets in the Ruhr valley, including oil refineries and industrial plants that aided the German war effort. Among these were blast furnaces that at night were self-illuminating and a natural target. For this raid the bombers flew at night. The ninety-nine aircraft on the raid hit sixteen different targets in the Ruhr area. The operation was not particularly successful, with only twenty-three planes reporting that they actually found their targets, and sixteen failing to make any kind of attack at all.

  After the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, and the fall of France on 22 June, Hitler turned his attention to invading Britain. The Luftwaffe initially concentrated on attacking shipping in the English Channel and coastal towns and defences. From 12 August, the focus shifted to the destruction of RAF airfields and radar bases. As Fighter Command fought off the Luftwaffe attacks in air battles over England, Bomber Command hit German airfields at Rouen and Amiens in France and Schiphol in the Netherlands. Bombers also targeted plants producing artificial oil from coal, which had been built at great expense to reduce Germany’s dependence on foreign oilfields.

  While the Battle of Britain raged, the Luftwaffe bombed London and other English cities for the first time on the night of 24–25 August 1940. Amid British anger, the War Cabinet immediately approved a retaliatory raid on Berlin, the cultural, economic and political centre of the Third Reich. The city’s war factories, and its role as an administrative and communications hub, made it a crucial military target as well as a symbolic one. On the night of 25–26 August, 103 bombers, mostly Hampdens and Wellingtons, attacked Berlin for the first time. While the damage was slight, Hitler was outraged, and ordered the Luftwaffe to begin targeting English cities.

  A further five raids on Germany followed in the next fortnight, but the difficulties of navigating at night meant the bombs were widely dispersed and ineffective. Raids on Berlin also had little impact. It was nearly 1900 kilometres from London to Berlin and back, and until the development of the Lancaster, that put Berlin at the outer limit of British bombers’ range.

  Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe was wreaking devastation on Britain. Between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941 there were major raids in which more than 100 tons of high explosives were dropped on sixteen British cities. The Luftwaffe attacked London seventy-one times, Birmingham, Liverpool and Plymouth eight times, Bristol six, Glasgow five, Southampton four and Portsmouth three. More than one million London houses were destr
oyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, almost half of them in London.

  Ports and industrial centres were also pummelled. Liverpool was the most heavily bombed city outside London, with nearly 4000 killed. Cardiff, Hull and Swansea were also bombed, as well as the industrial cities of Belfast, Coventry and Manchester. The Luftwaffe paid particular attention to Birmingham and Coventry because of the Spitfire and tank factories in Birmingham and the many munitions factories in Coventry. On 11 November 1940 Coventry was heavily bombed and its cathedral destroyed.

  Bomber Command was the only effective means Britain had to carry the war to Hitler and meet Stalin’s demands for a second front against the Germans in Western Europe. Following Dunkirk, Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook:

  When I look around to see how we can win this war there is only one sure power. We now have no army that can defeat the Nazi military power. Our sea blockade of Germany is broken and shortly Hitler will have the resources of Africa and Asia to draw from. Should he fail to invade the United Kingdom he will rebound eastward. There is only one thing that will stop him and that is devastating attacks upon the Nazi homeland by very heavy bombers from this country, without which I do not see a way through.

  Beaverbrook drew up plans to upgrade the heavy-bomber fleet and replace outmoded aerodrome infrastructure. After the fall of France, Bomber Command had fewer than 400 aircraft, of which only about 300 were available for operations. In June 1941, the aim of the Air Staff was to expand the bomber force to 4000 aircraft by the spring of 1943. Results would fall well short of that. It had been forecast that by January 1942 Bomber Command would have forty-two heavy bomber squadrons. In fact, because of production problems, it had only seventeen. And the heavy bombers that were delivered had serious teething troubles.

  While night attacks seemed the only viable tactic, the bombers struggled with visibility. Reports quickly reached London from observers on the ground that the bombers were failing to reach their targets. At first these reports were dismissed, but as other branches of the armed forces complained, an inquiry was launched. The Butt report concluded in August 1941 that by the time they reached the Ruhr, only one in ten aircraft flew within eight kilometres of its target. Half of all bombs carried were dropped in open country. Only one per cent fell in the vicinity of the target, and many aircraft returned to England with their bombs intact.

  As concerns grew about Bomber Command’s performance, there were nonetheless individual airmen whose exploits stood out. Among them was Western Australian Hughie Edwards. Hughie was born in Fremantle in 1914, the son of a poor Welsh immigrant family. An introspective but imaginative lad, he was selected for flying training with the RAAF at Point Cook in 1935. A year later he transferred to the RAF and posted to a bomber squadron. In 1938 he was badly injured in a plane crash and did not resume flying until the war began. In May 1941, still with a severe limp, he was appointed commanding officer of No. 105 Squadron RAF. His crew found him taciturn and aloof. One of them commented that Hughie was a very private person whose only aim was ‘to kill Germans’.

  On 4 July 1941, during his 36th operational sortie, Hughie led fifteen Blenheim twin-engined bombers to Bremen. It was a risky op, as Blenheims were regarded as vulnerable aircraft at the best of times. To attack a major city in broad daylight in Blenheims was hazardous enough; attacking one of the most heavily defended targets in Germany bordered on suicidal. During the approach to the German coastline, the bomber stream flew at an altitude of fifty feet to minimize the chance of being detected by radar. Despite this, German warships reported their presence. Realising that they had lost the initiative, Hughie Edwards took the crews following him down to ‘nought feet’ and hedge-hopped the last eighty kilometres to Bremen to regain some measure of surprise. Approaching the outer defences, they encountered a balloon barrage, but after threading their way through they were immediately attacked by the forewarned anti-aircraft gunners.

  As the pilots spread out into the arranged attack formation, enemy guns began by picking off four aircraft. After climbing slightly to clear the masts of moored craft and then dropping down again to get under some high-tension lines, Hughie roared in across the dock area and released his bomb load. Staying low, he crossed the suburbs and proceeded to circle Bremen. German anti-aircraft fire repeatedly raked his Blenheim, leaving the fuselage riddled with holes and the rear cockpit gunner wounded after a shell exploded. Only when the rest of the group had delivered their loads and flown clear did Hughie complete his reconnaissance and leave. Flying at low level, he made for Wilhemshaven before returning to England.

  When the eleven surviving Blenheims returned—with Hughie the last man in—the condition of the aircraft, and in particular the amount of German telegraph wire they had brought back, caused much amusement. On 22 July, the London Gazette announced that Hughie had been awarded the Victoria Cross for displaying ‘. . . the highest possible standards of gallantry and determination’.

  Such exploits buoyed his fellow airmen, who, despite the challenges, remained keen to take the fight to the Germans. In particular, they wanted to attack Berlin. A flight to the German capital was quite an event in 1941 and not the commonplace occurrence it would become in 1943 and 1944. Hughie’s Australian comrade Chad Martin was among those keen to make the raid. As he later commented, ‘Once you had bombed Berlin, you automatically assumed the hallmark of an experienced crew, considered fit to tackle any job in future operations.’

  Chad, a grazier from Cassilis, in central western New South Wales, had been a corporal in the 12th Light Horse Regiment militia before the war and, having decided that he wanted to move from saddle to cockpit, was among the first to train under the Empire Air Training Scheme. In November 1940 he graduated as a pilot officer. Once in England, in April 1941 he was posted to 57 Squadron RAF to fly Wellington bombers.

  Five months later, Chad was raring for the Berlin raid, which had been planned for the night of 20 September. ‘An attack had not been made for some considerable time, and it was beginning to look as though some crews would finish their tour without the chance of a smack at the big smoke,’ he said.

  At briefing, all the indicators were good: full moon, no cloud and excellent visibility. The crews knew that while it would be a perfect night for a raid, the conditions would also be perfect for the German night fighters. With the lack of scientific navigational aids, it would be necessary to make the most of the moonlight and take the risk with the night fighters. The planes would take off at dusk, cross the Dutch coast under cover of darkness, and get as far into Germany as possible before the moon rose. The route was almost direct, as the old Wellington Mark 1C had limited fuel capacity.

  The seventy-four Wellingtons and Whitleys met enemy ground fire while crossing the coast and then intermittent fire over the Netherlands. The raiders passed through the deep searchlight belt on the Dutch–German frontier. Other aircraft were being held by the searchlights, and attacked. Passing south of Bremen, Chad noticed one or two off course on his port side, ‘getting hell beaten out of them’.

  Just north of Osnabrück, the wireless operator, Bill Buckley, chipped in to say he had received a very indistinct coded recall message. Chad reasoned that with only 240 kilometres to go it would be absurd to go back. ‘Anyhow, we decided it might be a Hun decoy, so what the hell! Visibility was excellent and the sky clear, pinpointing was just too easy, and we had a lot of gravy [fuel] up our sleeves. No, best push on and bomb.’

  Eighty kilometres west of Berlin they altered course to starboard, intending to attack from the south-west. Over the chain of lakes outside Berlin, there seemed to be an ominous lack of activity from the defences. It dawned on Chad that there were no other bombers about. ‘We realised that the signal had been a recall. Here we were, just a lone duck, and a bloody stupid one at that.’ Altering height, air speed and direction in a series of corkscrewing manoeuvres and de-synchronising the engines ‘to help my
stify the ground defences’, they ran in over Berlin’s outer air defences. These were formidable, stretching across more than sixty kilometres of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, decoy fires, decoy marker flares and target indicators. Suddenly everything came to life, and Chad was in no doubt who the target was.

  Nothing for it now—nose down, throttles wide, revs 2475! The altimeter began to unwind rapidly and the original 15,000 feet on the clock was rapidly halved. On the other hand, the original 135 mph on the ASI [air speed indicator] was soon doubled. As we passed over the centre of the city, we seemed to run into a zone of silence. Bomb doors open, steady, steady: bombs gone, flash gone, bomb doors closed; the usual awful eternity, then nose down again, a rapid turn through 90 degrees to starboard, and we were heading out to the south-east with only 5000 feet on the clock. As the last searchlight appeared behind us the sound of bursting shells became inaudible. The nose of the aircraft was raised and height was gained as rapidly as possible. I don’t think any of the crew would have gone back just then for a million quid. Never was the desire to get back to England, as soon as possible, stronger.

  However, they had used considerable fuel during the evasive manoeuvres and were forced to slow to an economical cruising speed. The run back to the Dutch coast was quiet, but as they crossed the North Sea the reason for the recall message became apparent. Small areas of sea fog began to appear, thickening rapidly. The English coastline was invisible, cloaked in dirty yellow fog. Because their base was closed, they were ordered to divert to an aerodrome in the south of England, but a few minutes later that too closed. Instead the crew headed to a Norfolk aerodrome near the east coast. They made it, landing nine hours and fifteen minutes after take-off. ‘We didn’t sleep, we just died,’ Chad said.