Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  Ted knew the likely consequences, but as it was Christmas and he had just been blooded on operations, he wanted to join in the merriment in the officers’ mess. ‘I had some scotch. I remember vaguely having too much scotch,’ he recalled. Ted’s pilot, Keith Schultz, later helped him piece together the events that followed. Keith had to look after Gwynneth because, as Ted put it:

  I don’t remember anything from lunchtime on. I went into the mess and they were standing with their backs to the big fireplace and apparently, I was told by my skipper and others, they pointed the finger of scorn at me and were laughing their heads off. I got hold of [Rollo] Kingsford-Smith as I was falling to the floor and said, ‘You don’t have to worry, Schultz’s crew is just the bloody crew to crash the bloody Ruhr.’ We had done just three trips. The next morning I woke and it was the first morning I woke up with a hangover in my life.

  As he recovered from his hangover, Ted had to front Rollo. Knowing he was about to be carpeted, he went in trepidation, fearing that he was about to lose his rank as a pilot officer. ‘I went in and Rollo was seated at his table with a pen and then in twenty-five seconds or so, it seemed like an eternity to me . . . he didn’t see me salute, I was standing there and he looked up and he said, “You know you made a bloody fool of yourself don’t you.” I said, “Yes Sir, I’ve come to apologise.” He said, “Get out and don’t come back under similar circumstances again.” That was the end of it.’

  While he had to enforce discipline among his men, Rollo knew full well that the heightened pressure they were living under had to be released somehow. It seemed to him that those who downed the local draught beer—spirits were nearly unprocurable—seemed to cope better. The drinking, the company in the bar and forgetting about the war were important therapy. He thought that teetotallers, who were often alone when not flying, did not always handle the stress of operations well: ‘I used to worry about someone who kept everything to himself and didn’t drink.’

  Rollo was not averse to joining in the mess partying. One night, he was ready to start his engines and taxi out for take-off on another Berlin raid in bad weather when the operation was cancelled. Everyone, including him, felt relief, and a wild party in the mess followed.

  Some keen types, determined we would have some action, exploded thunder flashes and put signal cartridges in the fire. The whole building was rocked with the explosions, green and red smoke poured out of the doors. The alcohol seemed to prevent smoke suffocation. It was the one time I remember the station commander and station administration officer, who outranked me, showed their displeasure. As president of the mess I suppose I should have dampened it but my need to celebrate for being saved for another day was as great as all the others.

  Another night they were not so lucky. With just half an hour to midnight, and after all hands had been shovelling snow off the runways during the day, the crews were driven to their aircraft only to be hit by a blizzard. When the snow began to fall, Rollo thought that as it was a fairly regular winter occurrence in Lincolnshire, the RAF would be well equipped to handle it. ‘I was wrong. They needed manpower as well as their puny snow ploughs, and if there was no flying, the air crew were the most readily available.’

  Chastened after his carpeting, Ted Pickerd found there was little respite from operations. On the night of 29 December he flew again, when 457 Lancasters, 252 Halifaxes and three Mosquitos headed back to Berlin. The raid destroyed nearly 400 houses, killed 182 people and injured more than 600, and left more than 10,000 people bombed out. Eleven Lancasters and nine Halifaxes were lost. In one of the 463 Squadron Lancasters, Ted went about his navigation duties on this op, amid the mayhem of anti-aircraft shells. ‘You could see it all the time coming up. Quite frankly over a target they are all coloured and every one seemed to be aiming straight at you. When they get up and they burst they would be a hundred metres or even more away from you. It is like winning a lottery—only one ticket comes out. The Berlin trips were always psychologically frightening.’

  For pilot Arthur Doubleday, now flying with 467 Squadron, the 29 December raid was his first trip to Berlin with his new crew. En route, he asked the navigator how long there was to go. ‘Fifty-eight minutes,’ came the answer. ‘A quarter hour later I asked him to check the time and he told me eighty-eight minutes. The wireless operator said, “We’re doing bloody fine on our first trip, we’re going backwards.” But the navigator was sitting with his chair on his oxygen tube. He had cut his supply and was almost unconscious. We gave him some oxygen and he came good. He obviously hadn’t been navigating since he gave me the turn on hitting Denmark.’

  Dick Peck saw in the New Year with his fifth operation, a trip to Berlin that was uneventful because of cloud cover but stayed in his memory for quite another reason.

  On long trips we could get a small packed lunch or fruit to take with us. I never worried about it as you were unable to eat anything as you couldn’t take your oxygen mask off. On this trip Owen [Jones] decided to take an orange with him in the mid-upper turret and eat it when he got down to 10,000 feet over the North Sea. Unfortunately he found it had frozen solid and he was unable to bite or break it on the gun butts. The temperature had been down to –60°F, he was bouncing it off the concrete when we landed.

  Four nights later, on 5 January 1944, Dick, Rollo Kingsford-Smith and Ted Pickerd were among the Australians flying to the Polish port of Stettin in a stream of 348 Lancasters and ten Halifaxes. They destroyed twenty industrial buildings and more than 500 houses. Eight ships were sunk, nearly 250 people killed and more than 1000 injured. Rollo nearly collided with a single-seater Messerschmitt ME 109 fighter right over the target: ‘It was in brilliant light from searchlights and flares and the German pilot was looking down, not towards me. He was as scared as we were of the flak and he did not even see the Lancaster just over his head.’

  When Dick Peck was over the target, his Lancaster was hit by flak. ‘It came through the skin of the aircraft and thumped the bomb aimer . . . fortunately only bruising him in the ribs.’ Returning from the Stettin raid to base brought an unexpected hazard.

  In the dark the pilot taxied into the bomb dump, the aircraft coming to rest with its nose over the detonator hut, three propellers sticking through the roof of the hut and all the barbed wire entanglements wound around all four props. We called for a truck to pick us up and left the plane, what a mess! Two new engines and four new propellers were needed to fix the craft. The pilot was not reprimanded as they classified it as ‘an act of war’.

  Their near misses continued in a Lancaster that was among 498 bombers on Bomber Command’s first major attack on Brunswick on the night of 14 January 1944. German fighters hit the raiders early, entering the bomber stream soon after they crossed the German frontier near Bremen, and they continued to score steadily until the Dutch coast was crossed on the return flight. The damage inflicted by the bombs was minor, but thirty-eight Lancasters—including eleven Pathfinder aircraft—were lost.

  Dick Peck’s Lancaster was almost among the casualties when his aircraft was hit by bombs dropped from a Lancaster above. The 4000-lb ‘cookie’ just missed the nose. And the danger was far from over. ‘We flew into a cloud of thirty-pound incendiaries, one hitting the starboard inner propeller bending it and breaking the seal on the feathering mechanism causing hydraulic fluid to flow back onto the exhaust stubs,’ Dick recalled. At first this appeared to be an engine fire, but it soon went out when the oil was exhausted. Another thirty-pound incendiary then hit the leading edge of the starboard wing, putting a large dent in it, while others skated off the bomb-bay doors, which were open at the time and wider than the aircraft. This meant a long flight home on three engines. On arrival, the crew had to circle until all the other aircraft had landed, in case their plane crashed and blocked the runway. ‘We decided that if this happened again, we would not inform anyone until after we had landed,’ Dick said wryly.

  ‘Friendly’ damage was not uncommon in the crowded bomber streams, as Ge
rald ‘Gel’ McPherson, the young bank clerk from the Western District of Victoria, who had been itching to join his two older brothers in the RAAF, found on another raid over Germany. ‘Our squadron was scheduled to bomb from 21,000 feet at a specific time, and other squadrons were scheduled to bomb at levels of 21,500 feet and 20,500 feet at different times from us,’ he recalled. ‘Unfortunately one squadron above us was ahead of schedule and didn’t worry about our squadron below when they dropped their bombs.’ Gel and mid-upper gunner Jim Mallinson had their work cut out directing pilot Jeff Clarson to change course, left or right, to dodge the ‘cookies’ and 500-pound bombs raining down around them and threatening to blow them up.

  Eddie Ward, the 467 navigator for pilot Stan George, knew the problem well. He was startled on one night raid when Cliff Byfield, from Perth, their twenty-one-year-old mid-upper gunner, screamed: ‘Stan, there’s an aircraft with his bomb doors open right above us.’ Eddie saw Stan look up and say, ‘God, man, that’s dangerous.’ For Eddie, ‘it was a hell of a feeling to find a bloody aircraft with its bomb doors open, about twenty or thirty feet above you.’

  Tom Hopkinson, a self-effacing eighteen-year-old from Canberra, knew the terror of friendly fire. Tom had enlisted in the RAAF in early 1943 and trained as a mid-upper gunner before being posted to 463 Squadron. On a raid to Königsberg in Germany in August 1944, he witnessed an incident that would haunt him for the rest of his life. There were 189 Lancasters on the flight in what was regarded as one of the most successful attacks by 5 Group at extreme range. More than 40 per cent of all housing and 20 per cent of all industry in Königsberg were destroyed. The Luftwaffe shot down thirteen Lancasters, but another two were downed by their own side. Tom saw a bomb from an aircraft above hit a Lancaster alongside him.

  It was broad daylight. The bombing was brief, but at different levels and times. This bastard, they had bombed out of order. Buggers, they wouldn’t keep to their height and course. One of the bombs, I presume a high explosive bomb, it didn’t explode, hit them, on the starboard mainplane of the Lancaster alongside us. We weren’t in formation but we were certainly close. It slewed it round into the aircraft alongside. Killed them all [fourteen men] in both planes. No parachutes. I knew several of them. One of my mates, Mac, was among them. It was dreadful, I’ll never forget it.

  Nearly seventy years later, Tom’s voice filled with anger and grief as he recalled the carelessness of the crew above and its dreadful consequences. But the layers of aircraft involved in blanket bombing made such accidents almost inevitable.

  17

  CRAMPED

  For Rollo Kingsford-Smith, the Bomber Command flights to Berlin in the winter nights of 1943–44 were a challenge like nothing he had ever experienced. To say the long raids were uncomfortable was an understatement. The prospect of death was always present, but on top of it each man had to deal with the cold: temperatures in the aircraft were often bone-chilling.

  One thing that helped was adrenaline, which began pumping through airmen’s veins as the target—or an enemy fighter—approached.

  Once you are under attack the nerve at the back of your neck that makes adrenaline made copious quantities for me, it used to warm me. I could feel the blood flowing right down my legs, which were usually freezing, down my arms into my hands and then it would quicken my brain. Things happen very quickly in the air and two or three things happen at once, a second or two apart. My brain would speed up so much that the things seemed to happen about five or six seconds apart. It meant I could think what I would do with the next one. The adrenaline also improved my night vision so I was luckier than most pilots, I had very good night vision when I was under attack.

  The gunners suffered the most, not least Rollo’s ever-alert rear gunner, Darrell Procter, who removed his turret’s centre perspex panel—which often became scratched, misted or frosted up—to maximise his vision in the darkness. Rollo knew that removing the panel did nothing to improve Darrell’s comfort.

  When he was looking out at night time he wasn’t looking through perspex, because if you were to survive it was absolutely essential you saw the German fighter before it opened fire. The whole time we were in the air, this man, for six, seven, eight or nine hours was crouching forward in his turret—he was only a little guy—rotating it from side to side, looking up and down, without a break and nothing got near us that he didn’t see. You can imagine how cold he was.

  On the coldest night the outside temperature was minus 43 degrees Celsius. Now we had cabin heating and that raised the temperature by about 20 to 25 degrees so I was sitting in about minus 20, strapped in tight. God I was cold. I froze, my legs froze, until I was under attack.

  Lancasters had a heating system that varied from effective to ineffective depending on one’s location within the aircraft. Air coming through an intake opening in the leading edge of the mainplane was passed over the radiator system of the port inboard engine, then through insulated ducts to various outlets inside the fuselage. The aircraft was not sealed and pressurised, so a certain amount of air came in the front, particularly around the nose turret, making that area especially cold and draughty.

  Heating was reasonable in the cockpit area, and the pilot operated the heating controls, so he and the flight engineer were relatively comfortable. The navigator worked in fairly bright lighting behind blackout curtains, which meant that the heat for him and the wireless operator sitting nearby was well contained. Things were usually a little cooler around the mid-upper turret, and extremely cold back in the rear turret where Darrell Procter sat.

  Generally, the pilot, flight engineer, navigator and wireless operator wore normal battle dress over regular flying underclothes, with heavy knee-length woollen flying stockings over socks, and knee-high, sheepskin-lined flying boots. Over the battle dress, crew could wear an electrically heated long-sleeved jacket with a long umbilical cable that plugged into the aircraft’s power supply. Electrically heated trousers had press-stud connections to the bottom of the jacket that completed the electrical circuit, and electrically heated socks with similar press-stud connections to the bottoms of the trousers. Over knitted silk inner gloves, they could wear woollen gloves without fingertips, then electrically heated gloves with press-stud connections to the cuffs of the jacket.

  Despite all this clothing, frostbite was not unusual. The morning after long raids there would usually be several men outside the sick bay doubled over in pain from having had skin stripped off when it stuck to cold metal. On one raid, 463 Squadron skipper Noel ‘Sandy’ Sanders, a twenty-year-old from Kempsey in northern New South Wales, heard somebody moaning over the intercom, clearly in pain. Fearing a crewman was injured, he asked who was hurt, but received no response. When the aircraft returned to England, the injured crewman requested an ambulance. One foot had rubbed the wool on his heated sock through to the wire, which had burned a hole in his foot. Yet as painful as it was, the cold was worse and he would not disconnect it.

  All crew wore chamois-lined leather flying helmets with earphones in padded covers and attached oxygen masks which also carried a microphone. Jacks were located conveniently throughout the aircraft to plug in the intercom leads to earphones and microphone. There were also power outlets for the heated suits and oxygen outlets for crew to tap into the aircraft’s oxygen supply, and conveniently located portable oxygen bottles for those who had to move around the aircraft.

  And moving around was necessary to reach the Elsan—the sanitary pan at the rear of the Lancaster. Pilots such as Jack Lukies were loath to make the trip back to the Elsan, particularly at night, ‘when clambering in the dark along the inside and over the main spar which was rather hazardous and time consuming’. He allowed crew to use the pan when not over enemy territory.

  The first to use it was the mid-upper gunner. He advised me on the intercom he was leaving his turret to use the Elsan. I gave him a few minutes to get seated and pushed the control column forward and back, getting a howl of protest. The Elsan didn
’t seem to be used much after that. The first time I needed a pee I opened the side window of the cockpit and standing up, let it all go. It went alright, sucked out by the speed of the aircraft straight on to the mid-upper gunner’s turret where it froze and blocked his view. He wasn’t impressed. Then later I tried using a drain hose under my seat, but couldn’t get a fit so I let it run over the floor. Finally for a couple of times I just peed in my pants.

  Once the bomber flew above 10,000 feet it was necessary to put on oxygen. The issue came to the fore for Rollo Kingsford-Smith when he was returning from a Berlin raid. At about 24,000 feet, with several alterations of course needed, his navigator, Norm Kobelke, gave him a new course to steer. Rollo thought it was not right and queried it. Strangely, Kobelke offered another, drastically different course. When Rollo tersely asked what he was doing, a belligerent Kobelke threatened to come up and fight him.

  The highly experienced Kobelke was normally a disciplined navigator who did not become flustered. Worried, Rollo sent the flight engineer, ‘Junior’ Fairburn, back to the navigator’s station to check on the situation. This required him to first unplug his main oxygen supply and intercom leads and plug into a portable oxygen bottle. When Junior got there, he found Kobelke lying unconscious across his maps. His oxygen lead had become disconnected, possibly as a result of some violent evasive action Rollo had taken. Kobelke’s life was now in danger: sudden deprivation of oxygen at high altitude first deranges the victim, then knocks him out, and finally kills him. The engineer had found Kobelke just in time. He reconnected his oxygen, and a short while later he came good at about 10,000 feet over England and resumed his navigation duties in time to put the Lancaster over Waddington in low cloud and poor visibility. He had no recollection of any part of the incident.