Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  Unlike the crew, who wore parachute harnesses, Rollo and other pilots had their parachutes fitted into a hollow metal tray that formed their seat. They sat on the padded back of the ’chute, then did up their harness before strapping themselves into the seat as tightly as they could. The pilot had to be secure if he was to cope with throwing the Lancaster around ‘rapidly and violently’ the moment he came under attack. As Rollo put it:

  The Lancaster was very manoeuvrable but you had to use a bit of force to work everything, you couldn’t do that quickly if you were slipping around in your seat, so I’d tighten the straps down as tight as I could. I wasn’t sitting on a nice cushion, I was sitting on a dinghy on top of a parachute, and the dinghy had a compressed gas bottle in it so if you landed in the water the gas would release and inflate the dinghy. This bloody gas bottle was right at the bottom of my tailbone for hour after hour after hour.

  But cramped or cold was still better than dead. And by the end of January 1944, Rollo knew just how high the risk of death in a bomber was: 463 Squadron alone had lost eight aircraft and fifty-three aircrew killed in action. Two survivors had become prisoners of war, one escaped, and a gunner died when his oxygen system failed above 20,000 feet. On one night alone there were twenty-eight casualties. The condolence letters he had to write seemed unending. Rollo was devastated every time, but there was a war to fight.

  18

  THE SILENT WORLD

  Ted Pickerd had been lucky. The curt dressing-down Rollo Kingsford-Smith had given him after his drunken Christmas high jinks in the officers’ mess might have been much worse. But Rollo had ‘let him off ’ because he recognised Ted’s value as a crew member. Besides, Ted ‘hadn’t been there long and he was led astray anyway’. To Rollo, Ted was the de facto captain of pilot Keith Schultz’s Lancaster. ‘After a few operations I realised the real spirit in that crew was the navigator,’ Rollo said. ‘Within about three months or so I couldn’t miss him. He didn’t shove himself under my nose, he was a shy sort of bloke, but he was a good captain on that aircraft, he really ran that aircraft.’ Rollo knew that while Keith Schultz was a superb pilot, it was Ted’s organisational ability on which the rest of the crew relied.

  Ted was not generally given to outlandish revelry, but although he was no larrikin, he could be a bit of a wag at times. He soon became one of the leaders of singing in the bar, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere as his fellow airmen tried to drink the tension away. ‘A practical joke we used to play in the mess was one where we would get somebody up on the table and lift him right up and we’d put boot polish or something on his feet and we’d put footmarks coming out of an air-vent over there and walk right across the mess.’

  Away from the mess, though, Ted was meticulous. His attention to detail made him well suited to the complex task of navigation. Ted’s job required constant involvement in the flight, from start to finish. As the Lancaster’s four Merlin engines roared into life and the aircraft began to taxi down the runway, he would give the pilot the first heading to steer, then call out the airspeed to lift-off. ‘Fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five, and then round about eighty-five to ninety he fired the aircraft and it was airborne, when you got to about ninety you’d stop because the pilot had already got it. When he is busy it is pretty difficult for him to look at his airspeed indicator. Everybody had a little job to do.’

  The moment the plane was airborne, the gunners began rotating their turrets. The crew never referred to each other by name on the intercom. Ted recalled that if he had something to say at the same time as another crew member, Keith Schultz would nominate the one to speak: ‘He’d say, “Navigator, keep off the air for a moment,” or “Bomb aimer, let the navigator give me the course to steer.” In that way we didn’t have two people babbling on the intercom. We never cracked a joke, we were silent unless we had something to say. The wireless operator [Ken Fletcher] would probably fly the entire trip without saying anything.’

  It was a silent world for the long hours of flight, the drone of the Merlins often the only sound to be heard until the target was reached. Rollo thought there was a terrible monotony about the ops—taking off and climbing towards the Dutch, Belgian or Danish coasts, knowing that as they climbed German radar would be picking them up even though they were throwing out Window to confuse them.

  They could see it and you knew they’d be alerting the German defence system and you knew that the bloody fighter squadrons had been told that they had to fly again tonight. You knew, that as you crossed the coast the heavy batteries would open fire: usually a battery of four or five would fire at once, a salvo and if you watched—I used to watch out of the corner of my eye, I used to watch everywhere all the time—you’d see a very, very quick flash which was the muzzle flash reflected on the ground and you knew that whatever it was, about fifteen seconds or so, the bloody things would burst all around you. You knew, that if they were aiming at you—I always assumed they were aiming at me—that they’d been predicting my height course and speed. So I made sure I wasn’t where I was predicted to be.

  To increase his chances of survival, Rollo would alter his height, speed or flight path. Quite often, shells would burst all around and he would fly through the smoke. ‘The smell of cordite’s very strong, a very distinctive smell, but you’d never hear anything because you had four Merlins all going at maximum continuous power.’ Next would come the fighters. ‘The fighters were in zones and you knew as you’d gone through that particular zone the fighters would be landing, refuelling, re-arming and getting ready to take off and have a go at you on the way back.’

  In this relentless battle of attrition, it was dangerous to succumb to the monotony Rollo referred to. For Flying Officer Bruce Foskett, a twenty-one-year-old navigator, there was no risk of that. In early January 1944, Bruce sat down to write a letter home to his parents in Sydney. Although he had enlisted in the RAAF, he had been attached to the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 424 Squadron, part of Bomber Command’s No. 6 Group, flying Halifaxes. Bruce described what a raid was like, and how he felt about what he was doing now that his long training was over.

  We’ve a few trips in now, all to the Ruhr, and oh boy is that one hot place. No one who has never seen a target in there, as we go to work and blow it all to hell, could ever believe what it is like. It is fantastic almost and how on earth we can go through it and come out unscathed as we have done so far, is beyond me. The amount of hate that Jerry throws up at us, everything but the kitchen sink, and even that at times I think, is amazing. And I don’t blame him, for, although they are Germans and all that that entails, I sometimes feel sorry for those people we give such an awful plastering.

  There was never a closer thing than a living hell I don’t think, than one of our raids at its height. By God, there’s something wrong somewhere when we have to do this sort of thing to each other, the thought of it makes me sick, yet I know we have to do it for everyone’s good. But how can they stand it for so long beats me. I know I’d sooner be up where we are than down on the ground under us, catching all the stuff we let fly at them.

  The first target Bruce saw staggered him, especially the searchlights. The feeling of security he had inside the Lancaster ‘in all the enveloping darkness of the night’ as they screamed across enemy territory disappeared the moment those lights lit up the sky.

  We’ve only been caught once so far, and then only for a couple of minutes, but I’d thought we’d had it. Up there with something between 20 and 30 lights on us, I felt as though I was standing naked on the stage at a full theatre and it appeared we’d never get out of that blinding, dazzling glare. We must have been living right though, for somehow one moment there we were lit up like a Christmas tree just waiting for it and the next moment we were out in the clear and we were back in darkness again. Boy, did I have my fingers crossed, especially when I could see they had us bracketed with flak, six bursts on each side every few seconds, right at our height and gradually
creeping up in on us, closer every salvo. Those dirty black puffs were following us right along but then we slipped out of their lights and only had a few holes to show for it when we got back.

  After the lights came the flak, which burst in pinpricks that lit up the sky. They seemed to be everywhere. When a bomber was ‘coned’ by converging searchlights, the enemy poured up the beams.

  All over the place you see aircraft coned. All around these targets for miles you see these cones, 20 and 30 and often more lights to a cone, and away up where the beams cross is an aircraft looking just like a moth and absolutely surrounded by flak bursts. And all the way up the beams for about 10,000 feet you can see their light flak and tracer simply closing up in the one direction till it comes together at its limit height, wavers and falters and then falls away. This light stuff is green and red and blue and silver and it’s an awesome sight to see it pouring up.

  Then there were the flares, the enemy’s and Bomber Command’s, in all colours and types, bursting all over the sky in great showers of fire that spread out and gradually fell like a giant blanket.

  There’s some kind of stuff they put up that’s silvery in colour and breaks out like tinsel, shimmering and shivering in the sky, amongst all the other strange lights and flares. Maybe you’ll see a kite go for a Burton [RAF slang for an aircraft being shot down] and murmur a silent prayer for the boys with her who are not having the luck you are. But that part of it is not a nice sight.

  To Bruce, targets were just one great area ‘burning and smoking like hell’. Even from high altitude, the bomber crews could see the ugly dark red flames erupt as incendiaries took hold and buildings began to burn. Separate fires would spread and merge into one vast inferno.

  Perhaps, too, you’ll see an explosion, one of our bigger bombs maybe, or even a factory. And there are thousands of pin points on the ground as the guns down there go off, just pin pricks when they are not firing at you in particular, but ugly flashes when they are.

  Now take all these things and put them together. Those thousands of searchlights, the [anti-]aircraft cones all around, flashes of flak bursts, and black smoke puffs all around you and all over the sky, and sometimes too, smoke from the fires below. Then all those weird and wonderful many coloured flares and lights and the long wavering streams of light flak and tracer, a kite going down, and then the centre of it all the burning, blazing, smoking inferno that is the target. It would be a really beautiful sight, and it is, if it weren’t so deadly. I’ll never forget it.

  Bruce wrote that he hoped his parents did not mind him telling them about his work: ‘My only wish is that you don’t let it worry you. We’ve been through it a few times now and can do it again as many times as we have to.’ Or so all airmen had to believe.

  A few days earlier, on New Year’s Day, another Australian and his crew prepared for a Berlin raid and similar hazards to those Bruce Foskett had faced. Twenty-seven-year-old Flying Officer William Richard ‘Bunny’ Lee, attached to 106 Squadron RAF, hailed from Dirranbandi in south-western Queensland. Tall and solidly built, he was a builder by trade. One night he was enjoying an evening meal at the pub in Dirranbandi when he was joined by a bored RAAF clerk from a recruiting train passing through town. After chatting with him for a while, Bunny asked if the RAAF had any jobs available for carpenters. The clerk suggested he try for a position in an aircrew. Bunny liked the idea, but said he did not have the necessary educational qualifications. Why not take a correspondence course, the clerk said. Bunny did, and once in the RAAF he proved a talented pilot.

  Now in England, he and his crew were ready to leave their station at Metheringham in Lincolnshire when a fault occurred in their Gee radar set. Anxious to get airborne, Bunny waited impatiently and, when attempts to fix it failed, declared that they could do without the device. ‘M for Mother’ took off late for the flight to Berlin, in the wake of 420 other Lancasters. Once they neared the city, they had no difficulty following fire flares that the Pathfinders had dropped earlier.

  Just outside Berlin, a lone Focke-Wulf 190 spotted ‘M for Mother’ and dived in for what the German pilot must have thought would be an easy kill. Rear gunner Peter ‘Red’ Hunnisett spotted the enemy fighter and hurriedly yelled out a warning over the intercom. Bunny threw the Lancaster into a corkscrew while Red fired back at the enemy aircraft. As it closed in, cannons blazing, Red continued to pound away with his four guns. The Focke-Wulf swept past his turret as he kept firing. Then, to his huge relief, some tracer found its mark. The enemy fighter seemed to stagger in the sky before exploding in a fiery ball.

  When they reached the city in the early morning, it was well ablaze below them. As they dropped their load—one 4000-pound ‘cookie’, thirty-two thirty-pounders, and 900 four-pound incendiaries—the Lancaster was caught in the probing glare of ground searchlights. More searchlights quickly locked onto it. As Bunny desperately tried to escape the blinding cone of lights, a deadly curtain of flak swept up at them, exploding all around. Red-hot metal splinters smashed into the wings and fuselage. RAF navigator Alex McKie recalled the drama:

  We wondered afterwards why the wings had not come off because being thrown about must have put an enormous strain on the aircraft. It was a magnificent demonstration of flying by Bunny because the Lancaster was not a small aircraft.

  He dived and corkscrewed and dived again, and eventually we got out of the cone at 5000 feet. Bunny maybe couldn’t land an aircraft well [an old crew joke] but he could certainly fly one.

  Back at base, the exhausted crew left the dispersal area almost immediately and trooped over to the mess for a hot breakfast. When they had finished, they went out to inspect the damage to ‘M for Mother’. They were shocked by what they saw. Dozens of holes had been torn through the fuselage, wings and tailplane. Most alarming of all, an unexploded cannon shell from the downed fighter was lodged right at the base of the starboard wing. Had it exploded, their aircraft would have been blown to pieces.

  19

  AN INVITING TARGET

  Jack Mitchell, the 467 Squadron pilot who had left home wondering about the stick he had driven into the ground at the Sugarloaf in Tasmania, slid into the pilot’s seat of his Lancaster and left Waddington at 2020 hours on the night of 21 January 1944. His orders were to bomb Magdeburg, about 140 kilometres south–west of Berlin. An important industrial centre producing armour and machinery, the city was also a transport hub, a junction for six railway lines and seven arterial roads as well as river routes between the Elbe and Rhine. A total of 648 aircraft were on the raid for the first major attack on the city, fifteen of them from Jack’s squadron. Jack’s Lancaster was carrying one 4000-pound bomb, fifty-six thirty-pounders and 1200 four-pound incendiaries.

  Jack’s crew consisted of Flying Officer Ken Francis, the navigator, from Sydney; Sergeant Tony Atkinson, the flight engineer, a New South Welshman who had been working as an engineer in England when war broke out; Flight Sergeant Reg Corcoran, the bomb aimer, from Sydney; Flying Officer Lawrie Pearse, the mid-upper gunner, from the Western Australian wheat-belt town of Cunderdin; and Flight Sergeant Ron Gallagher, the rear gunner, from Kalgoorlie. Rounding out the crew was the Scottish wireless operator, Sergeant Bill Summers. All of them were aged between twenty and twenty-five, and three were engaged to be married.

  They were a tight crew. As Ken Francis wrote to his family, ‘I could not wish for better or more reliable companions in this business.’ They knew their jobs and were a ‘decent lot’ he added. But Ken found it hard to come to terms with the nature of his job, dropping bombs that killed civilians and caused terrible destruction. After his first raid, he wrote in his diary, ‘I looked out over the target and everything seemed unreal, it was like the decorations on a Xmas tree. But it was hell for the people down below.’ After the next one, he wrote, ‘I did not look out this time.’

  The Germans followed the progress of the bomber force across the North Sea, and even before it reached the German coast, their night fighters struck wit
h murderous effect. A total of fifty-seven aircraft were lost—thirty-five Halifaxes and twenty-two Lancasters. The attack was a failure. Thrown into disarray, the force dropped most of its bombs outside Magdeburg.

  Jack Mitchell’s Lancaster was among the lost. Nothing was heard from it after take-off. In Australia, the Department of Air notified each man’s family by telegram that he was missing, having ‘failed to return to base presumably due to enemy action’. The telegram continued: ‘The Minister for Air joins with Air Board in expressing sincere sympathy in your anxiety.’ Four days later, 467 Squadron Commanding Officer Sam Balmer wrote to Jack’s father, Cliff Mitchell: ‘Your son was the Pilot and Captain of the aircraft which set out on operations and although he was only with us a short while he was considered a fine and capable officer who will be sadly missed by us all.’

  With no confirmation of death, many parents—and fellow airmen—clung to the hope that their son or mate had been captured. In a letter a few weeks later, Sam Balmer wrote: ‘We are all hoping that [Jack] and his crew may have been able to bail out and later be reported as prisoners of war.’

  Tony Atkinson’s father wrote to Cliff Mitchell in solidarity:

  [Tony] was in England when war broke out so immediately joined the RAF with four years almost as ground staff, two of them in Canada and had all the time been endeavouring to get into the air. He succeeded last August when an application for a flight engineer’s job made by him twelve months before in Canada came home to roost, it pleased him immensely, I’m afraid his mother and I were not nearly so gratified; however he got what he most wanted and all to do now is to wait for news and may all come out right.

  So now we are pinning our hopes on them all being POWs and I believe that no news for the next couple of months is good news.