Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  To succeed, the plan required superbly skilled pilots. A new unit, 617 Squadron RAF, was formed in 5 Group to carry out the ‘dam-busting’ operation. Wing Commander Guy Penrose Gibson, of 106 Squadron RAF, was chosen to assemble and lead it. The Englishman had a formidable operational record in night fighting and bombing and a reputation as a courageous and charismatic leader. He agreed to undertake the top-secret Operation Chastise with no idea of what it involved.

  Bomber Command chief Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris ordered Gibson to pick men who had survived about sixty bombing raids, as they would have the necessary experience needed for the attack. Micky Martin was an obvious choice.

  Another Australian who joined 617 Squadron was South Australian Flight Lieutenant Dave Shannon, the son of a wealthy state politician. His smooth complexion and unruly blond hair gave him the air of a teenager. To look more mature, he grew a wispy moustache, but when he was introduced to King George in 1943, an event that coincided with his twenty-first birthday, the monarch commented: ‘You seem a well preserved twenty-one, Shannon.’ Dave had enlisted in the RAAF three years earlier, as soon as he turned eighteen. After completing his training, he was sent to England and posted to 106 Squadron RAF, completing thirty-eight operations under Guy Gibson’s command. He later recalled: ‘When I was flying with [Guy] I seemed to be able to read his mind and anticipate every move he expected of me as his co-pilot and flight engineer. He seemed to be able to relax when I was with him in the cockpit. I was just twenty and Guy was already an old hand and he was only four years older than me.’

  When Gibson left to form the new squadron, Dave was posted to a Pathfinder squadron. ‘I had only been there for twenty-four hours when I received a call from Guy Gibson. He said, “I am starting up another squadron for a special raid. I cannot tell you where or what it is, but if you would like to re-join me, I would only be too willing to have you back.” I said, “Yes,” so I did not get to fly one op as a Pathfinder.’

  He regarded Guy Gibson as a magnificent leader, a ‘pied piper’ whom people followed implicitly. He had an ‘eye for the ladies and he was off duty a great boozer’, Dave recalled. ‘You either loved Gibson or you were scared of him. He could be very tough and quite ruthless when the situation demanded it of him.’

  Gibson also chose two other Australian pilots: Flight Lieutenant Bob Barlow, a thirty-two-year-old car salesman from Melbourne who had enlisted in April 1941, flown with 61 Squadron RAF, and been awarded the DFC; and Pilot Officer Les Knight, a twenty-two-year-old former accountancy student and teetotaller, also from Melbourne, who had enlisted in February 1941. His crew, who included Australian wireless operator Bob Kellow, twenty-six, from Newcastle, regarded Les as an exceptional pilot even though, as one crewman recalled later, ‘He couldn’t ride a bicycle or drive a car.’ Also selected was New Zealand pilot John Leslie ‘Les’ Munro, a dour and earnest twenty-four-year-old farmer nicknamed ‘Happy’.

  Micky Martin’s crew included four more Australians—Flight Lieutenant Jack Leggo, twenty-seven, from Sydney, the navigator; Flight Lieutenant Bob Hay, twenty-nine, from Renmark in South Australia, the bomb aimer; Pilot Officer Bertie Foxlee, twenty-two, from Brisbane, the front gunner; and Flight Sergeant Tom Simpson, twenty-five, from Hobart, the rear gunner. Flying Officer Len Chambers, from New Zealand, was the wireless operator, and Englishman Ivan Whittaker, an RAF pilot officer, the engineer.

  Guy Gibson’s crew included Australian Pilot Officer Fred Spafford, twenty-four, from Adelaide, who was the bomb aimer. Tony Burcher, a twenty-one-year-old rear gunner from Sydney, was on the crew of the popular RAF pilot John ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood. Unlike Dave Shannon, Tony did not particularly like Guy Gibson. ‘He was a strong disciplinarian,’ the gunner said, recalling a fight in the mess with a RAF warrant officer who did not like colonials. ‘I was pushed forward by my RAAF mates because I was a bit of an amateur boxer. We had a fight and during the fight he was thrown out through a window.’ Next morning, the warrant officer accused Tony of picking the fight.

  I was taken before Gibson, he read the charges out and said that I’d picked the fight in the mess. I said, ‘No, Sir, he picked the fight. He threw the first punch and I was just defending myself and defending, as he put it, colonial aircrew.’ He said, ‘Be that as it may, you had no right to get involved with a fight with a senior warrant officer.’

  Anyway, he gave me a reprimand and I was banned from drinking in the mess. A notice was put up in the mess saying Sergeant Burcher was not permitted to buy alcoholic liquor in the mess. I got over that one by getting my mates to buy the drink for me, and that was changed to: ‘Sergeant Burcher will not drink alcoholic liquor in the mess,’ so I drank my beer on the front steps and they couldn’t do very much about that.

  The date chosen for the raid was the night of 16–17 May 1943. To destroy the dams, the bombs would have to be dropped from an altitude of just sixty feet, at an air speed of 230 mph, and at a precise distance from the target. Any higher and the bombs would break apart on contact with the water. To overcome the problem of this height being too low for altimeters to work, the Lancasters were fitted with Aldis (Navy signal) lamps at nose and tail: when the light beams met on the water under the aircraft, it was at sixty feet. The bomb aimer would then find the distance from the dam by looking through an eyepiece at the base of a Y-shaped wooden sight: when two nails on the arms lined up with the towers on the dam, the correct release range of between 400 and 430 yards had been reached.

  Intensive night-time and low-altitude flight training began, with 617 Squadron’s Lancasters out night after night, roaring over the countryside at ever lower and lower levels—lower than any squadron had ever done before—stampeding the flocks in the fields, and causing floods of angry letters to pour into RAF station Scampton. The practice began to pay off. Dave Shannon recalled hitting targets with a diameter of just two metres—unheard-of accuracy for the time.

  Security was tight: no outbound telephone calls were allowed, and all mail was censored or held over. When Tony Burcher’s WAAF girlfriend, Joan, phoned, ‘I didn’t say anything to her, I was too terrified that I’d say something that might be slightly incriminating.’ But one airman was dismissed for breaking silence. As Dave Shannon recalled, the man ‘telephoned his girlfriend pre-operation. Guy Gibson was quite brutal and coldly efficient and he was dismissed in front of the squadron at a full parade of the unit. Security was the key thing. Nothing else mattered.’

  In only eight weeks, Operation Chastise was ready to go. But with two days to go, the Chiefs of Staff had still not confirmed the targets. On 15 May, the day before the attack, Guy Gibson was given a full briefing on the plan. Until then, he and his squadron had been kept in the dark. Gibson informed his two flight commanders, Squadron Leaders Melvin Young and Henry Maudslay, his deputy leader, Hoppy Hopgood, and Bob Hay, Micky Martin’s bomb aimer, who was the squadron bombing leader.

  After the meeting, Gibson was informed that his black Labrador, Nigger, had been killed outside Scampton’s main gate after being hit by a car. Nigger had flown with Gibson on many occasions and crews regarded him as one of the ‘boys’, often sharing a pint with him. Upset by the loss of his faithful dog, Gibson did not want the news to get out in case the aircrews saw it as a bad omen. The next day, 16 May, as crews prepared for the raid that night, he arranged for the dog to be buried at around midnight, just when he was due to lead the first wave in to attack the Möhne dam.

  The bouncing bombs, code-named ‘Upkeep’, were delivered to Scampton just three days before the raid. Each 9250-lb bomb contained 6600 pounds of explosive and was set to detonate at a depth of nine metres. Suspended on two crutches beneath the plane, whose bomb-bay doors had to be removed to accommodate it, it looked to Tony Burcher ‘like the front roller of a steamroller—like a jam can’.

  The Operations Room for the raid was at 5 Group headquarters in Grantham, Lincolnshire. The operation codes included: Goner, meaning ‘bomb dropped’; Nigger—in memory of Gibson�
��s dog—meaning that the Möhne dam was breached and planes with bombs should attack the Eder dam; and Dinghy, meaning that the Eder dam was breached and planes should move on to the Sorpe. ‘Dinghy’ was Melvin Young’s nickname, a reference to two forced landings at sea, which had required him to use rubber boats.

  At the briefing, scale models of the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams were unveiled and studied. ‘When we saw it was dams and they weren’t very highly defended, I think if anything there was some relief,’ Tony Burcher recalled. The squadron was divided into three groups. Formation No. 1, assigned to the Möhne dam and then the Eder, was composed of nine aircraft in three groups; with the aircraft piloted by Guy Gibson, Hoppy Hopgood and Micky Martin; then Melvin Young, RAF Flight Lieutenant David Maltby, and Dave Shannon; followed by Henry Maudslay, RAF Flight Lieutenant Bill Astell, and Les Knight.

  Formation No. 2 numbered five aircraft and was to attack the Sorpe dam. The bombers would be piloted by Flight Lieutenant Joe McCarthy, an American serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force; RCAF Pilot Officer Vernon Byers; Bob Barlow, from Melbourne; RAF Pilot Officer Geoff Rice; and Les Munro. Among the crew in Formation No. 3 was RAAF navigator Cec Howard, a thirty-year-old from Perth. They would leave Scampton more than two hours after the first two waves. They would follow the route of the first wave and act as a mobile reserve to attack any of the primary targets that had not been breached or move onto the secondary targets: the Lister, Ennepe and Diemel dams. If all targets had been breached before they reached the Dutch coast, the reserve unit would be recalled.

  The crews were warned not to stray from the planned routes, which had been chosen to avoid flak batteries, night-fighter bases and hot spots all the way from the Dutch coast to the dams and back. They were told to maintain low altitude for the entire flight there and back, and were further warned that under no circumstances should anyone return with an Upkeep bomb intact, since doing so would make landing extremely hazardous.

  After the briefing, the crews sat down to the traditional eggs and bacon before leaving to make their final preparations for the attack. As Dave Shannon walked out to his Lancaster, Hoppy Hopgood joined him for a cigarette at the rear of a nearby hangar.

  Hoppy then said to me after a few minutes of silent contemplation, ‘I think this is going to be a tough one, and I don’t think I’m coming back, David.’ That really shook me up a bit to hear it expressed in his soft-spoken tone but so matter-of-factly voice. I said, ‘Come off it Hoppy! You will beat these bastards! You have beaten them for so long, you are not going to get whipped tonight!’

  As Tony Burcher walked out to board Hoppy’s Lancaster, he chatted with one of Dave Shannon’s crew. This conversation prompted him to go back and pick up a jar of malted milk tablets that his mother had sent him after hearing tales about all the starving people in England. Tony normally didn’t bother to take any on operations, but this time something told him it would be a good idea to stash some in the inside pocket of his battle dress, along with the normal Benzedrine tablets that were issued to airmen to keep them awake.

  Just after 2100 hours, Gibson’s wireless operator fired a red light and the Merlin engines on the Lancasters of the first two waves roared to life. The American, Joe McCarthy, was late to leave after an engine coolant leak. At 2128 hours, a green light flashed from the control tower and Bob Barlow’s Lancaster lumbered along the grass runway with the rest of the second wave, flying on a northerly course. They opened up their engines, lifted off over the boundary fence, and turned towards the North Sea. At midnight, the third wave left, following the same southerly flight path as the first wave. After seeing the first two waves away at Scampton, Barnes Wallis and 5 Group Commander Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Cochrane left to join Sir Arthur Harris back at the operations room in Grantham. All they could do now was wait.

  9

  THE GERMAN FROM SYDNEY

  As Hoppy Hopgood’s Lancaster crossed the Dutch coast, in moonlight so bright it seemed like day, gunner Tony Burcher’s peace was shattered. The aircraft was flying at less than 100 feet with the others in the first wave when flak hit the wing, damaging an engine. Inside the bomber, the situation was worse. The front gunner was dead, Tony was wounded and Hoppy was bleeding badly from his face. As he struggled to stay airborne, with the plane brushing over tree tops and under high tension cables, Hoppy checked the crew and said, ‘Right, well, what do you think? Do you think we should go on? I intend to go on because we’ve only got a few minutes to go. We’ve come this far. There’s no good taking this thing back with us. The aircraft is completely handleable. I can handle it OK. So any objection?’

  There was none.

  Just as had happened to Hopgood, the stronger than expected winds blew Guy Gibson’s and Micky Martin’s bombers off course. They too crossed the Dutch coast in the wrong position, right over an area of anti-aircraft batteries. They drifted off course again as they crossed from the Netherlands into Germany, attracting the attention of flak and searchlights. But only Hopgood’s Lancaster was hit. Elsewhere, the bombers in the second wave were also running into problems. Les Munro, the Kiwi pilot, was forced to return to base after his aircraft took a hit. Bob Barlow’s Lancaster crashed into power lines and burst into flames over Germany; the entire crew was killed. Bill Astell, in the first wave, also crashed, somewhere over Roosendaal in Germany. He and his crew perished after their Lancaster was either hit by flak or smashed into an electricity pylon. In the second wave, Vernon Byers’ plane was shot down over the Dutch coast, and all on board were killed.

  In the first wave, Guy Gibson, Hoppy Hopgood, Micky Martin, Dave Shannon, Les Knight, Melvin Young, Henry Maudslay and David Maltby arrived at the first target, the Möhne. Anti-aircraft emplacements defended the dam, and as Gibson made a dummy run, the guns began firing. He circled and went in to attack. As the motor began back-spinning the bomb ready for the drop, Gibson levelled at sixty feet. His sights lined up, Fred Spafford pressed the release button and the bomb tumbled down, bouncing three times across the lake before sinking. Dave Shannon watched as ‘a huge bloody spurt of water went up hundreds of feet but the wall was still there. Hoppy went in next.’

  While Gibson had the benefit of some surprise, Hoppy did not. ‘When [the Germans] realised where we were coming from, they just put up a wall of fire which we had to fly through,’ Tony Burcher recalled. Shells smashed into the port engines, which spurted flames. The hits made Canadian bomb aimer Jim Fraser release the weapon late. It bounced straight over the dam and destroyed the power station on the other side.

  As the bomb was released, Tony ‘felt a terrific shuddering in the aircraft’, but then his turret stopped moving: the port engine driving the hydraulics had failed and burst into flames. ‘Christ, the engine’s on fire,’ Hoppy said. ‘Feather it, press the extinguisher.’ As the flames intensified he said, ‘Right, prepare to abandon aircraft.’ Then, ‘Everybody get out.’ Tony cranked the turret hatch back by hand as fast as he could, got out and put on his parachute. Still plugged into the intercom, he heard Hoppy say, ‘I’m abandoning aircraft. For Christ’s sake, get out.’

  At that moment, Tony saw RAF wireless operator Johnny Minchin crawling along on his hands and knees, dragging his leg and ‘in a hell of a state’. Tony put Johnny’s parachute on him and threw him out the rear door, holding the rip cord to open the canopy as the Lancaster climbed west of the dam on its two starboard engines alone. Jim Fraser pulled the escape hatch and, against regulations, unfurled his parachute in the aircraft. He hit the tail wheel as he went but landed unscathed.

  Then it was Tony’s turn. With the bomber too low for a normal parachute jump, he also pulled the ripcord inside. He felt a ‘great rush of air’ and a belt across his back from the parachute halter as he was dragged out, hitting the tailfin as he went. As he left the plane, the wing sheared off and he passed out. The Lancaster exploded in mid-air when the fire reached its main tanks. Hoppy Hopgood and the remaining crew were killed instantly. Hoppy’s foreboding had been r
ight. Johnny Minchin’s parachute failed to open in time and he also died.

  Tony Burcher fractured his back as well as his kneecap in the jump, but luck was with him. He landed in the middle of a recently ploughed field which cushioned his fall. If Hoppy had gone straight ahead, Tony would have landed in a spot where flood waters would soon be raging. In all likelihood he would have drowned. ‘Everything was on my side that night,’ he recalled. At least he had survived.

  Meanwhile, Guy Gibson called in Micky Martin. In an attempt to reduce the amount of flak Micky would take and prevent a repeat of Hopgood’s disaster, Gibson flew in just ahead of him, drawing the flak away. Micky made a perfect run and Bob Hay released his bomb at the correct point, but it veered off to the left and exploded without breaking the wall.

  Melvin Young’s Lancaster was the fourth plane to attack. Micky Martin joined Guy Gibson in trying to distract the gunners on the dam while Young made his run. Gibson turned on his navigation lights to draw the Germans’ attention while Young’s bomb aimer released the bomb. Their attack went perfectly, the bomb bounced three times before sinking next to the dam wall and exploding. A huge column of water spouted into the air, but when it subsided the wall was still there, mocking them, as Dave Shannon put it. Then, as Dave watched, David Maltby made a perfect run in, with Guy Gibson and Micky Martin once more drawing fire by flying on either side of his Lancaster. His bomb too seemed to have no effect. Dave Shannon then prepared for his attempt:

  I was just starting my run in when suddenly the dam’s wall collapsed and I heard Guy yell over the radio excited but coldly calm, ‘It’s gone! It’s gone!! For Christ’s sake, David, hold off.’ The wall had indeed gone. I think it was probably the bombs of Dinghy’s and David’s [Young’s and Maltby respectively] who between them had smashed this bloody great wall with their bombs in the right place. It was a tremendous sight, we just saw the tail end, but the water was getting more and more and faster and faster—it poured out of the lake, taking everything in front of it. After a few minutes it was just an avalanche of mud and water and stuff going down the hill.