Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  Keith, who had been a journalist before enlisting in Brisbane in March 1942, began to count the planes, but with his neck aching and his sight wavering, he stopped at 122. There were just too many to tally: from east to west, the sky was filled with black specks. ‘They were going over to France. We were to learn, later on, that today was the awaited day—D-Day. A friend stood beside me on the pavement: we watched the last dark swarms vanish where the cloud broke. “It must be hell over there,” he muttered. Within a few days we were to see it for ourselves.’

  During the previous few weeks, the tempo at Bomber Command had increased, with a series of operations to soften up the Germans in preparation for OVERLORD.

  In the final days before the invasion, attacks were made on coastal batteries, troop concentrations, ammunition dumps and explosives factories. Radar and wireless stations and the remaining ten gun batteries at the invasion beaches were also hit. A vital step in keeping the date and locations of the landings secret was to destroy the radar station at Ferme d’Urville, on the Cherbourg Peninsula. The station escaped serious damage on the first attempt, but on 3 June ninety-six Lancasters and four Pathfinder Mosquitos made amends. Bill Purdy was part of the attack. ‘We dropped “cookies” and 1000-pound bombs on this and wiped it completely. No trouble,’ he recalled.

  On the eve of the invasion, aircraft dropped propaganda pamphlets over France announcing the imminent invasion. ‘LES ARMEES ALLIEES DEBARQUENT,’ the headline screamed, ‘The Allied armies are landing.’

  OVERLORD had been set for 5 June, but inclement weather forced a twenty-four-hour delay. When the meteorologists forecast a thirty-six-hour ‘window’ of better weather beginning 6 June, Eisenhower cast the die. ‘OK, let’s go,’ he said. At Binbrook, to relieve the tension caused by the unexpected standdown, Hughie Edwards instructed Perc Rodda to organise a scratch cricket match against a team from nearby Grimsby. Hughie, who captained the station team in the Grimsby cricket competition in the summers of 1943 and 1944, enjoyed the chance to get away from the stress.

  On the evening of 5 June, an operation order came through on Wing Commander Rollo Kingsford-Smith’s Telex machine. The twelve-point message set out detailed guidelines for the coming operation. Nos. 463 Squadron and 467 Squadron were to join in an attack on German gun emplacements at Pointe-du-Hoc overlooking the Normandy coast at 0450 hours the next day.

  The five giant 155mm guns at Pointe-du-Hoc, each in a dug-in concrete casemate, were part of the ‘Atlantic Wall’ that stretched from the Franco-Spanish border to Norway. Early in 1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had begun strengthening these coastal fortifications, constructing a string of reinforced-concrete emplacements to house artillery, anti-tank guns and machine-guns. The Germans planted mines and anti-tank obstacles on the beaches and offshore to destroy Allied landing craft. As Rollo read the Telex message, he could not know that there were now nearly six million mines in northern France. Rommel was certain Germany would inevitably be defeated unless the expected invasion of western Europe could be stopped at the beaches.

  The big guns at Pointe-du-Hoc had a range of sixteen kilometres, easily covering the beaches code-named Utah to the west and Omaha to the east. Rollo immediately grasped the implication of the order to destroy the emplacements on the Omaha side. ‘It pointed to one thing—a landing on that beach would follow our attack. It made my heart glad, it was immensely significant and I took a copy [of the message] and stuffed it in my pocket,’ he recalled. Rollo would not countenance failure. ‘In my mind this attack would be about the most important my squadron had ever made, and we were all determined it would succeed.’

  The order called for the aircraft to bomb from 6500 feet or higher with the goal of achieving craters fifteen metres apart. If it was necessary to bomb from a lower altitude they should climb as quickly as possible to 6500 feet using maximum power. Mosquitos guided by the Oboe navigation system would mark the target with red flares that would burn for seven minutes and cascade from 1500 feet. Other Mosquitos would back these up with green indicators as soon as the red ones were seen.

  Errors up to 200 yards are to be accepted by the controller if there is not time to issue a corrected vector before bombing starts, and the main force is to be ordered to bomb . . . if the error exceeds 200 yards, then the main force is to be instructed to wait, and the controller is to issue a correcting vector.

  All crews are to be warned at briefing of the importance of strict adherence to the laid down routes, timing, and height restrictions.

  At about 0200 hours on 6 June, Rollo led fourteen 463 Squadron Lancasters into the early-morning darkness, together with another fourteen aircraft from 467 Squadron led by Squadron Leader Lloyd Deignan, a twenty-seven-year-old from Toowoomba, Queensland. No. 5 Group’s master bomber Willie Tait directed the massed attack from the air.

  Rollo’s squadron had a leisurely flight to the Normandy coast, keeping to between 6000 and 7000 feet. There was low cloud most of the way, but it started to break up as they approached France. About eight kilometres out from the coast, when he could just discern the dark grey surface of the sea beneath in the dawn light, the fleet of invasion barges opened their throttles for the dash to the beach. ‘It was too dark for me to see the boats but their increased speed made white wakes and these showed up clearly. I knew it was on.’

  The five-gun German battery stood on thirty-metre-high cliffs 6.4 kilometres west of Omaha beach. With the location well marked by the Pathfinder Mosquitos, the bombers caught the defenders by surprise. From a relatively low height, about 6000 feet, and with no German fighters around, they took their time to finish the job. Each Lancaster dropped 13,000 pounds of bombs.

  They smashed the big concrete bunkers so hard that part of the cliff tumbled into the sea. ‘There was no opposition, the fort was pulverised and I was back at base for breakfast,’ Rollo later recalled. Bill Purdy was also on the Pointe-du-Hoc raid. He saw ‘literally thousands of ships’ going towards the coast with the first of the troop-landing ships approaching the beaches. ‘We could have just about put our wheels down and landed on them.’

  About two hours later, US Army Rangers scaled the cliff to take out the gun emplacements, not knowing the bombers had already obliterated them. They reported seeing only ruins: shattered concrete and twisted steel. (Seven decades later, Pointe-du-Hoc is still pockmarked with large craters.) The big guns themselves, however, had been moved away two days earlier on orders from Rommel.

  Bomb aimer Bill McGowen was in a 467 Squadron Lancaster headed to the coastal gun emplacement at St-Pierre-du-Mont, behind Pointe-du-Hoc and overlooking Omaha beach. In thick cloud, the bomber began to ice up. ‘The ice was breaking off the wings and hitting the aircraft with bangs,’ Bill recalled. ‘My compartment was thick with ice and I had no visibility at all.’ Bill thought it would be impossible to bomb, but his pilot, Tom Davies, descended below cloud level to about 4000 feet so the ice would melt in the warmer air. ‘Immediately we saw a sight that never will be seen again,’ Bill said, ‘hundreds and hundreds of ships in an area twenty miles long and seven miles wide. The invasion of Europe had started.’

  By now they were late and there were no other aircraft in the vicinity. As they crossed the coast at Omaha beach, navigator Mark Edgerley plotted a course for the target, which soon appeared. Dawn had broken and bombing conditions were ideal, but the damage they caused seemed to be light. Bill saw that a radar mast was still standing and aimed for it. ‘It was a perfect drop, the bombs forming a line running up to and through the radar installation. I was unable to assess the damage but Col [Allen], the rear gunner and Mark reported seeing the mast topple over. That was our contribution to D-Day.’

  Just after 5 a.m., No. 3 Group, with seventeen Australian pilots spread through its squadrons, made the final pre-invasion attack on the sleepy town of Ouistreham, fifteen kilometres north of Caen, in Normandy. Eric Silbert was a month shy of twenty-one when he set out on the op with 622 Squadron RAF in his role as a wireless oper
ator/air gunner.

  It was not a difficult raid, in fact it was one of the easiest we did because of the remarkable number of aircraft that flew. On returning we were talking about the raid and one of the boys who did not fly said: ‘I’m never going to live this down. My wife was on one of the barges taking troops out to the ships while I stayed back. I can just picture my children asking me what I did on D-Day and I’d have to tell them that I stayed back listening to the wireless while Mummy went to war.’

  Dambuster Dave Shannon and his 617 Squadron Kiwi comrade Les Munro were part of TAXABLE, a deception operation. The aim was to fool the Germans into believing that the main invasion of France would occur in the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. Along with Operation GLIMMER, the plan involved the precise flying of elongated circuits and dropping of Window. To German radar, this gave the impression that a flotilla of ships was approaching the fake landing site on a twenty-kilometre front. The ruse worked. The Germans concluded that a huge convoy was moving towards Cap d’Antifer. Troops and armaments were rapidly deployed to the area, leaving the actual landing sites in Normandy relatively undefended. As with GLIMMER, the last aircraft of 617 Squadron witnessed German shore batteries opening fire on the ghost convoy. Tongue in cheek, Les Munro wrote in his log book:

  The most hazardous, difficult and most dangerous operation ever undertaken in the history of air warfare, involved flying within at least 9 miles of the enemy coast without fighter cover, and in conditions of bright moonlight and at a height of not more than 3000 ft at which the aircraft was open to attack by the deadliest of all weapons—light flak. Believed successful.

  When it came time for 617 Squadron’s CO, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, to sign off on the squadron pilots’ log books, he noted on the side of Les’s entry: ‘Certified that S/Ldr Munro is still in possession of most of his faculties after completing the operation described on this page.’

  In all, Bomber Command dropped more than 5200 tons of bombs during the final pre-invasion raids to silence enemy shore batteries. It was the greatest tonnage dropped in one night thus far in history. Of the 1136 aircraft involved, 168 came from Australian squadrons or had RAAF pilots. Rollo Kingsford-Smith later described the events of that day as ‘the most thrilling and emotional experience’ he had during the war. ‘Until that moment Bomber Command had alone been taking the war to the Germans. For all I knew it would continue on and on until my crew and I finally joined the killed-in-action list. A massive army on the continent meant it was not unreasonable to think that the war might finish and I might get to see Grace and [daughter] Sue again.’

  He would—but not for some time.

  27

  DEATH ONLY A MATTER OF TIME

  Bill Purdy reckoned he was owed some sleep when he returned from his D-Day raid to Pointe-du-Hoc. But he had barely got to bed when 463 Squadron was ordered to fly to the Normandy town of Argentan that night to destroy a rail and road junction about fifty kilometres from the beachhead.

  The weather was bad enough to cancel flying under normal circumstances. I was third in the take-off queue. The first had some sort of trouble, didn’t get off the ground and ended up in the street leading into Waddington village. Number two was probably un-nerved by this and ground-looped to the left, wiping off one wheel. My turn came next and fortunately I got airborne.

  The bomber stream flew to the French coast at less than 1000 feet owing to the cloud base. As they neared Argentan, the cloud broke sufficiently to enable the Lancasters to climb to 3500 feet to bomb. Below, the railway marshalling yards were full of German troops and equipment, including a complete tank division. As the controller for the raid, Rollo Kingsford-Smith knew that the target was vital to the Germans’ ability to move defenders to the coast. But he was determined to pulverise it with little or no damage to the adjacent village.

  I held up the attack for about five minutes to avoid confusion with another target under attack a few miles away. There were a few complaints, but not many. Milling around the target in the dark, and held back by their CO, the operational discipline was always excellent but the radio comments—always with no call sign—were typically Australian: pertinent, disrespectful, sometimes rude and usually funny.

  Rollo was the last to bomb at Argentan, at 0140 hours on 7 June. His approach to the bomb release point was made on a shallow descending dive, at 4000 feet, with the bombs dropped as usual in a ‘stick’—that is, released rapidly one after the other. But Rollo’s zeal to destroy the target got the better of him. He was aiming for micro-second intervals so the bombs would fall right across the target.

  I was possibly over keen and was too low, so when the first bomb exploded, its blast hit my aircraft with a really severe thump and in a flash I realised that as I was still losing height each successive blast would be harder and heavier. At this late stage being brought down by my own bombs may have showed my determination to press home the attack but it would have been a stupid way of finishing my career.

  Back at base, the ground crew found that the self-inflicted damage amounted to a small dent under the tailplane. At the debriefing, Rollo reported that the bombing ‘appeared good and attack successful’. It seemed that a train, possibly carrying ammunition, had been set on fire. 463’s most experienced flight commander, Squadron Leader Alec Vowels, reported to the briefing session that while returning from Argentan the bombers were fired on by the British Navy, which only stopped firing when the colours of the day were fired. According to Rollo, it was not unusual to be fired on by the Navy around D-Day. The English Channel was full of Allied naval ships that ‘continued to fire on us as we went across backwards and forwards’. ‘Fortunately,’ he added, ‘they were not as accurate as the Germans.’

  That same night twenty Mosquitos from 464 Squadron RAAF attacked German road convoys and trains in northern France, while 460 Squadron bombed the road network at Vire, in north-western France. Because of a target marking error, the raid went wrong, destroying ninety-five per cent of the town and killing 400 of the inhabitants. Raids that same night left more than 1000 people dead at Caen, and 700 at Lisieux.

  From 0630 hours on 6 June, Allied troops stormed the mined beaches in the face of fierce German fire and gradually fought their way inland. While 73,000 American First Army troops went ashore at the code-named Omaha and Utah beaches, more than 83,000 British Second Army troops landed on the beaches code-named Juno, Sword and Gold. By the end of D-Day, the Allies had also landed 6000 vehicles, including 900 tanks, 600 guns and about 4000 tons of supplies.

  The turning point of the war had been achieved. From New York on 7 June, John Curtin sent his congratulations: ‘Great events are taking place which cannot be encompassed by mere words. The prayers and hopes of every Australian will go with the Allied forces in their liberating march.’

  Soldiers and supplies continued to pour ashore on D-Day-plus-one. But with their foothold still precarious, the Allied troops could have been in serious trouble had the German armoured divisions been able to get to the battlefront rapidly. For this reason, Rollo Kingsford-Smith noted, his squadron among others was kept busy attacking the German tanks and rail transport routes in and around the Normandy area. In the next few days Rollo led 463 Squadron on more raids to railway junctions and tank concentrations. Their task was made easier by a welcome absence of German fighter planes.

  Among the tactical raids was an attack by more than 480 bombers on the marshalling yards at Rennes, Brittany, on the evening of 8 June. Piloting Lancaster ‘Uncle Joe’ from Waddington, 463 Squadron skipper Noel ‘Sandy’ Sanders was halfway down the runway when there was an explosion under the starboard wing. WAAFs and others who had gathered to farewell the aircraft immediately threw themselves to the ground. Those in the control tower, including 5 Group commander Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Cochrane, also sought cover. Sandy realised that he had lost a tyre. It was too late to pull up, but with a few kangaroo hops and throttles through the gate he managed to lift the Lancaster off at the end o
f the runway and clear the hedge. The air gunner reported that what remained of the tyre was still lying halfway down the runway. Knowing the hazard this would present to other following aircraft, Sandy broke radio silence to report briefly, ‘tyre on runway’.

  The flight was fairly straightforward until they reached Rennes, where the bomb aimer had difficulty in picking up the target. By the time Sandy had made several runs to ensure they were on the mark, most aircraft had cleared the city. Suddenly, just as the bombs were away, flak ripped through the Lancaster, tearing a gaping hole in the fuselage beside the navigator, Eric Rosenfeld. Shrapnel tore away the leg of his trousers and part of the sleeve of his battle jacket, but he survived unscratched. In all, the flak had caused forty-three holes, but Sandy was able to guide his bomber home.

  It was later established that the tyre blow-out had happened as the Lancaster ran over a live .303 round. Returning air gunners cleared their guns as their aircraft taxied down the runway. When a search along the runways and perimeter tracks yielded a harvest of live .303s, orders were given for the practice to end immediately.

  Sandy’s navigator Eric Rosenfeld was, at thirty-two, the old man of the crew. As such, he was affectionately known as ‘Pop’. Eric had worked in the timber industry at Ravenshoe, Queensland, where his grandfather ran a mill, before enlisting in February 1942. Tall and solidly built, he had trouble finding a uniform that would fit him when he arrived in England. Issued with a chit to have one made, he realised it did not specify a price limit, and promptly went to Savile Row to have a uniform tailor-made, right down to the custom-fitted shoes. Years later, Eric was still having his shoes made in London and sent to his home in Cairns.