by Peter Rees
A few weeks after sending the graphic description of the Ruhr raid to his parents in Sydney, navigator Bruce Foskett prepared for another op. His Halifax was among 891 bombers sent to Berlin on the night of 15 February 1944, the first time that more than 500 Lancasters and more than 300 Halifaxes had flown on a raid together. This force too was spotted soon after it left the English coast, but for their approach flight the planes swung north over Denmark. This put them beyond the range of most German fighters, but only for a time: the foiled fighters simply waited to attack the bombers over Berlin. Cloud covered the city for much of the raid, but it still killed 320 people, caused nearly 1200 fires, destroyed nearly 1000 homes, and wrecked some of Berlin’s most important war-matériel plants, especially in the Siemensstadt area. The 2642 tons of bombs dropped was a record.
Among twenty-six Lancasters and seventeen Halifaxes lost on the raid was Bruce Foskett’s. It was shot down over Falkenberg, just outside Berlin, killing all on board. The Germans identified Bruce’s body by the service number on a tab inside his sock. The bomb aimer, twenty-one-year-old Pilot Officer John Fisher, was also Australian. The crew members were buried with full military honours by a Luft-waffe detachment and their graves ‘decorated with fir branches in traditional German winter style’, according to an official report.
The wing commander of the Canadian Air Force squadron wrote to Bruce’s father four days later, noting that even though Bruce had just arrived on the squadron, he had ‘demonstrated great ability and made many friends’. Bruce’s effects had already been gathered together and forwarded to the RAF central depository. He concluded that Bruce’s comrades in the RCAF admired ‘the heroic sacrifice your son has made so far from home in the cause of freedom and in the service of his country’.
A few months later the Foskett family received a second blow. On 31 October 1944, Bruce’s elder brother Russell, a squadron leader who had been awarded the DFC, was returning from operations to his base at Kalamaki in Greece when his Spitfire developed engine trouble over the Mediterranean Sea. Russell bailed out but was too low for his parachute to open. His body was recovered by a Royal Navy aircraft carrier and he was buried at sea.
Ross Stanford seemed to revel in the challenge of the Berlin raids. The twenty-six-year-old South Australian former bank clerk took part in eight such operations with 467 Squadron. When a recruiting train came through his home town of Tailem Bend in 1941, Ross had eagerly volunteered, only to have his hopes dashed when the medical officer declared him unfit for flying. A cricketer who would one day reach first-class level, he had once had concussion when a ball hit him on the back of the head. It was feared that the after-effects might impede his performance at 20,000 feet.
Four months later, Ross presented himself once again at the RAAF recruiting office in Adelaide. While waiting to see the medical officer, he struck up a conversation with a corporal who quietly advised him not to mention the concussion, even though it was on his medical record. It worked. He sailed through the physical and was designated as a pilot. In England, he quickly developed a fine reputation, though on one occasion he was nonplussed when his station commander asked to fly with him while he dropped a few practice bombs at the Wainfleet Range, on the east coast.
I felt there must have been a problem somewhere, but anyway off we went and flew up to 8000 feet, with a bombing error calculated to 20,000 feet. We dropped about ten practice bombs, and when we landed I thought we’d done pretty well, although the group captain said he thought I’d used too much rudder on my bombing runs. At afternoon tea he came and sat opposite me, clutching the results of the exercise sent over by Wainfleet. He said, ‘I’ll have to apologise to you, Stanford. Waddington reports that yours was the best exercise put in by anyone on the squadron since they’ve been there.’ Our average error was sixty-eight yards—very tight bombing in those days.
Among Ross’s crew were four Australians—Warrant Officer Alan Jordan, the wireless operator; Pilot Officer Tom Butler, the navigator; Warrant Officer George Clarke, the bomb aimer; and Pilot Officer Ken Jewell, the rear gunner. They joined 617 Squadron RAF on 24 February 1944. Their first op came a week later: a raid on the La Ricamarie ball-bearing works near Lyon. When they reached the target, however, they found that the bombsight had failed. Ross called the squadron’s commander, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who instructed him to wait until all the other crews had bombed.
He then told me to come down to 3000 feet—the target was roughly 1200 feet above sea level—and instruct my bomb aimer to drop his bombs by his own judgement. He gave me directions to come in downwind so that the smoke was all blowing the other way. The factory was well alight by now, and we came down and George Clarke dropped his bombs. It was the first time he’d dropped bombs on judgement and the lowest I’d ever flown to drop them!
Filled as they were with high explosives, incendiary bombs, petrol and oxygen, the bombers were an inviting target for German fighter pilots, as air gunner Geoff Smith found. A flight sergeant with Pathfinder 156 Squadron RAF, Geoff, who came from Sydney, was the only Australian on a Pathfinder crew that was making its sixth trip to Berlin on 15 February 1944. Geoff had been flying as mid-upper gunner, but on this night he was sent to the rear turret so his usual place could be taken by a new gunner who had never been on an op before. Apart from the usual flak over the coast, the flight was uneventful. But, as they prepared to make their bombing run, Geoff saw what appeared to be fighter flares in the sky. Then he recognised the wing tip, nose and identification lights of a night fighter. Telling the pilot to take evasive action, he instantly swung his turret and opened fire at the German aircraft, which was only 500 or 600 metres away. Within a few seconds, four lines of tracer and two lines of cannon fire streamed from the fighter’s wings. Geoff got in a good burst and saw the fighter explode in the sky, but the Lancaster had already been hit.
So had Geoff: a cannon shell and machine-gun bullets had shattered one of his legs. His turret was unserviceable, and his parachute cover was on fire. Cannon shells had raked the Lancaster from the tail along the fuselage to the mid-upper turret, which was now out of action. An exploding shell had broken the new mid-upper gunner’s left leg and ripped open his calf muscle. The oil pipe at the bottom of his turret had been pierced and the oil was blazing. Instruments had been blown to bits, hydraulics shattered, the rear wheel shot away, the starboard wheel damaged, and the flaps rendered inoperable. A shell fragment had pierced one engine, and the bomb-bay doors were jammed shut.
When the captain called his crew to check for casualties, there was no answer from the mid-upper gunner. The wireless operator went back to see what had happened and found the gunner lying on the floor without his oxygen mask, almost unconscious. Despite his broken leg, he had gone down to beat out the oil fire with his helmet and then tried to crawl forward and inform the pilot. Revived by oxygen, he was laid out on the floor while the fire was put out. The wireless operator climbed into the mid-upper turret and took up the watch for enemy fighters.
Some of the crew told Geoff they were coming down to get him out. But knowing that the mid-upper gunner was wounded and his turret out of action, he refused to be moved, despite the appalling pain of his shattered leg. The navigator extinguished the fire with his parachute, and Geoff continued to operate his turret manually.
The crippled Lancaster now headed for home, but with its instruments all but useless, it strayed off course and flew into a heavily defended area. The pilot made such violent evasive manoeuvres that at one stage the crew thought he must have lost control. Eventually, however, they flew clear of the flak and, straightening course, crossed the coast to the sea. By this time Geoff’s oxygen mask had frozen up, so he took it off and breathed the thin high-altitude air.
As they flew over the sea, the crew chopped the bombs away and then went to the rear turret to extricate Geoff. The turret door was frozen so hard they had to chop it away with a crash axe. Still fully conscious, Geoff tried to pull himself out by using his
left leg and hands, but his shattered right leg was caught in the ammunition belt and controls. The crew struggled for almost an hour to free him, then gave him painkillers and laid him on the fuselage floor.
The pilot headed for the nearest base, where he intended to make a belly landing, but the bomb-bay doors, which had been opened when the crew cut the bombs away, could not be closed. He had no alternative but to come down on the damaged undercarriage. The bomb aimer and wireless operator lay down on either side of Geoff to protect him in case they crashed. The pilot made his approach and brought the crippled bomber down in what Geoff later described as the ‘most beautiful landing’ imaginable. The fuselage was hacked away and Geoff—his hands, forehead and cheekbones badly frostbitten—was carried out of the aircraft, along with the mid-upper gunner. Next morning, his leg was amputated. He recovered to learn that he had been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal.
20
BEATING THE ODDS
Although as navigator he was supposed to look up as the Lancaster was flying, Ted Pickerd could not resist looking down when he was over a target. ‘As this coloured flak came up it all seemed to be pointing straight at your forehead. It scared the hell out of me the first time I saw it. Then you’d get coned in the searchlight. Your blood flows thickly and thinly, quickly and slowly. There is apprehension, it is not fear.’
Ted never knew what his pilot Keith Schultz felt at such times. ‘Keith was always steely, he never said much.’ Rarely were they coned in searchlights for more than a few seconds, and they were never holed by flak. Nonetheless, Ted took precautions. Underneath his flying suit, ‘I wore clothes that [meant] I could merge in with the community if [we were shot down and] there was a chance of evasion,’ he said. The crew also took steps to increase their anonymity in the sky. ‘Because the wireless operator [Ken Fletcher] and I had lights on, just behind the pilot, we pulled a black screen across so we didn’t give the aircraft position away.’
About halfway through Ted’s first tour, the threat posed by German fighters intensified when the ME 109 was fitted with the upward-firing Schräge Muzik (‘jazz’) cannon. This weapon enabled pilots to take advantage of a Lancaster’s blind spot by rising beneath it and firing into its wing tanks, setting them ablaze. As Ted put it, ‘You wouldn’t even see the fighter that would shoot you down.’
One of Ted’s Waddington comrades, Peter Dale, a rear gunner from Brisbane in 467 Squadron, did witness such an attack. On a night raid to Harburg, near Hamburg, to bomb oil storages, Peter saw a JU-88 rise up under a Lancaster with a full bomb load, about 1000 metres away. ‘I didn’t open fire because of the possibility of hitting the Lancaster at that range,’ he recalled. ‘Their rear gunner didn’t have a clue the JU-88 was so close up underneath him and then in seconds “WHAM”. The JU-88 opened fire with Schräge Muzik cannons and quickly dived away downwards. Sadly, the poor old Lancaster and crew exploded in a hellish ball of flame and fragments.’
On the night of 19 February 1944, seventy-eight of 823 bombers heading for Leipzig were shot down by fighters that continued attacking all the way to the target. The loss rate for the Halifax IIs and Vs on this raid was 14.9 per cent—so severe that they were permanently withdrawn from operations to Germany.
On one of the Berlin raids Ted Pickerd took part in, on the night of 24 March, 8.9 per cent of the 811-bomber force was shot down when strong winds, which had not been forecast, scattered the aircraft and carried them too far south. But the worst op Ted ever endured was the one to Nuremberg six nights later, when ninety-five of 795 aircraft were lost, more than on any other raid in the war.
The first German fighters appeared in the moonlight just before the bombers reached the Belgian border, and fierce fighting continued for the next hour, leaving eight-two bombers shot down. Ted watched in horror as more than twenty Lancasters around him exploded and fell to earth.
We were about half way to the target and the gunners and the crew were starting to say, ‘There’s one going down now to starboard.’ I would note the time down and the estimated position and report that when we got back because that information on some occasions could be put into the hands of the Underground on the Continent and they could pick up the crew. It got, ‘There’s one down;’ ‘There’s another one going down over on the starboard side;’ ‘Another one gone down behind us.’ So much so that I had to say, ‘Navigator to crew are you sure they are not spoofs,’ because the Germans used to fire off pyrotechnics into the air which exploded like an aircraft. All the crew said, ‘Come on navigator we’ve had enough experience at seeing aircraft go down, these are not spoofs.’
The raid was planned on the basis of an early forecast that there would be protective high cloud on the outward route. The moonlight would illuminate the target area for ground-marked bombing. But a Mosquito carried out a meteorological reconnaissance and reported that cloud cover was unlikely—except over the target. The warning was ignored.
Rollo Kingsford-Smith was also on the Nuremberg op. He recalled:
The weather along the route was as forecast. A long straight in track nearly all the way to the target in bright moonlight and clear skies, most bombers leaving four clear vapour trails. Over the target there was thick cloud and the marking and bombing were ineffective. Gaining an extra 1000 feet or more above the majority of aircraft we were higher than the vapour trail level and left none. Lancasters were exploding in great balls of red flames all around us. I told the crew not to waste precious seconds looking at them and to search only for enemy fighters coming close enough to engage us. And we had no combats.
Despite the heavy bomber force losses on the indisputably failed raid, 463 Squadron lost no aircraft. ‘We were lucky or maybe my tactics of flying straight, level and gaining height were being accepted by the pilots,’ Rollo later observed. Ted Pickerd also got home safely, but only after some terrifying moments. They had just started to descend on the English Channel when Ted heard the mid-upper gunner, thirty-nine-year-old Bill Dawes, from Queanbeyan, New South Wales, say, ‘For Christ’s sake corkscrew port, go, go, go!’ A JU-88 was heading at them. Pilot Keith Schultz instantly went into the evasive manoeuvre, and rear gunner Kevin Flute, a twenty-three-year-old from Rockhampton in Queensland, blazed away at the German plane. Ted had just opened his little coffee flask. As the aircraft dived and the guns began firing, the coffee spilled all over his table. ‘The smell of cordite came through the aircraft. I sort of thought to myself, “God, I’ll have to pull my finger out if I’m going to find out where the aircraft is after we come out of this!” After what seemed an eternity but was probably only a matter of seconds Bill Dawes said, “You’ve got him Flutey, he’s going down in flames.” ’
It all happened so quickly, Ted recalled, that he did not have a chance to be frightened. At the post-op debriefing, they claimed the JU-88 ‘kill’ on Kevin Flute’s behalf. Ted had the position and the time, and about a month later it was confirmed that he had shot down a JU-88: ‘I don’t know how they established it, whether the Brits picked up the pilot out of the Channel and got the information or whether other aircrew reported an aircraft going down into the Channel, but he was accredited with shooting down an aircraft, which was a pretty rare thing. Justifiably our rear gunner got an immediate DFC for that.’
The loss rate meant that Bomber Command crews flew an average sixteen raids each. Ted and his crewmates were on their seventeenth raid when the encounter with the JU-88 occurred. They had beaten the odds. ‘We weren’t destined to go down on the average number of trips,’ Ted said. ‘But I didn’t know that at the time.’
In the Battle of Berlin, 463 Squadron lost 103 men killed, with ten taken prisoner, but the luck of Ted’s crew held. ‘We were extremely lucky,’ he said. He believed that ninety per cent of getting through a tour was luck, but the crew always took the attitude that they would maximise their control over the remaining ten per cent. ‘If you could ensure ninety per cent of that ten per cent, you were better than the daredevils who didn’t
try to ensure even ten per cent of that ten per cent.’
As well as the losses suffered by 463 Squadron, its sister unit at Waddington, 467 Squadron—the only Australian squadron to take part in all sixteen heavy-bomber raids on Berlin—lost eighty-five men killed, with eight taken prisoner. No. 460 Squadron also suffered badly. In December 1943, it lost eleven crews in Berlin operations, and in the following two months another fourteen crews were killed. The loss of twenty-five aircraft and crews meant that the squadron’s entire fighting force had to be replaced after just three months. These losses were typical of the dreadful toll the battle took on Bomber Command: between November 1943 and March 1944; 2690 men were killed and nearly 1000 captured.
In Berlin, the bombings left more than 10,000 civilians dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. Amid the destruction, anti-Nazi journalist Ursula von Kardorff wondered about the rationale behind the Bomber Command raids. As the battle began to subside, she took stock, noting that German morale had not collapsed.
I feel a growing sense of wild vitality within myself, and of sorrow too. Is that what the British are trying to achieve by attacking civilians? At any rate they are not softening us up . . . The disaster which hits Nazis and anti-Nazis alike is welding the people together. After every raid special rations are issued—cigarettes, coffee, meat. As Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor said, ‘Give them bread and they will back you up.’ If the British think that they are going to undermine our morale they are barking up the wrong tree.
Von Kardorff saw rubble heaps decorated gaily with small paper bags and streamers bearing lines like, ‘Führer command. We’ll follow’, or ‘Our walls are breaking, but not our hearts’.
Her assessment contrasted with the Air Ministry Directorate of Intelligence in London which talked up the outcome of the attacks on Berlin. The Directorate reported in early April that the raids had ‘reduced German morale to such an unprecedentedly low level’ and prejudiced the war effort to such an extent that it was ‘causing the German authorities the gravest concern’. The Directorate predicted a process of ‘gradual disintegration on the Home Front’.