Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  The crews returned to a laudatory message from 5 Group’s commander, Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Cochrane. He said that reconnaissance photographs taken in daylight showed a concentration of bombs on and around the aiming point, sealing the tunnel mouths. This would have been considered excellent had there been no opposition. In the circumstances, the accuracy achieved was a ‘magnificent tribute’ to captains and crews. It was now known that the Germans ignored all other attacks that night to devote all their available strength to defending Saint-Leu—some 100 twin and thirty single-engined fighters, many concentrated over the target. Losses would have been far heavier had it not been for the aircrews’ ‘excellent discipline’ and strict adherence to the flight plan. Cochrane continued:

  Although the cost of the operation was high, it achieved its purpose and received from the Press the recognition which you so fully earned. I believe it to be the best achievement yet put up by No. 5 Group and an indication to the Germans that even under conditions most favourable to them, they are still unable to stop attacks on the targets they value the most highly. Well done.

  The Saint-Leu depot was rated by the Germans to store 2000 V-1 bombs, and it had supplied seventy per cent of all those launched against London in June. The raid had all but destroyed it.

  Ten days later, Bill Purdy and his crew were among nearly 950 bomber crews that flew to the area around Caen. Their goal was to attack five fortified villages through which British Second Army troops were about to make an armoured assault after Allied troops had been held up for six weeks. As he flew over the target area, Bill could not see a wall standing. What he did notice was how little room there was for error—the opposing forces were only about 600 metres apart. The raid went well, and inflicted serious damage on two German divisions. To Bill’s relief, no German fighters appeared.

  But that was not the case a week later, on 25 July, when his plane was one of ninety-four Lancasters that, with six Mosquitos, attacked a supply dump at Saint Cyr. The flak was intense, three bursts of it tearing into Bill’s fuselage. As he struggled desperately to avoid it, a ME 109G chimed in, putting a neat row of cannon shells through the fuselage about thirty centimetres in front of rear gunner Ken Dever’s turret. Suddenly Bill’s plane ‘looked like a colander’. His bomb aimer, twenty-five-year-old Sydney horse trainer Colin Papworth, had a sliver of flesh scythed from his neck as he bent over his bombsight, while a piece of shell smashed through the roof of Gordon Earl’s navigation compartment, destroying his charts and lodging in his table. When Bill checked the Lancaster after limping back to Waddington, he saw a cannon-shell dent in the aircraft’s only piece of armour plating—immediately behind his head.

  Keith Campbell, from Tamworth, a twenty-year-old bomb aimer with 466 Squadron RAAF, was also lucky. At 0200 hours on 25 July, Keith was part of a stream of 461 Lancasters and 153 Halifaxes headed for the German industrial city of Stuttgart. About fifteen kilometres west of the target, his Halifax collided with another Halifax at 21,000 feet. ‘All I can remember was an explosion and someone saying “Bloody hell!”,’ Keith recalled. Blown out of the aircraft, he blacked out before coming to at about 10,000 feet. Somehow his parachute had been activated. ‘It was amazing that I even had it on,’ he said. Keith landed in darkness in a wheat field, buried his parachute under stones, lit a cigarette while he took stock of his situation, and headed west.

  A few days later, he was walking along the side of a road when a German stopped his car and offered him a lift. ‘I made out I was a French worker but he had better French than my bare schoolboy French.’ Keith still had some chocolate from his survival rations and offered it to the man’s young daughter. Just outside Stuttgart the driver stopped and ushered Keith into an inn where they had a beer. ‘Then he handed me in to the police.’ Keith would spend the rest of the war as a POW, first in Stalag Luft VII, and then in Luckenwalde. At least he was alive: he was the only survivor from either of the two Halifaxes. It had been his thirty-fourth op.

  By early July 1944, 467 Squadron wireless operator Bert Heap’s homesickness was worsening. He wrote home that he had been tempted a couple of times ‘to burn some of the gum leaves’ that his sister, Jessie, had sent in a letter. But he decided to keep them until he got ‘really homesick’. At least the Ginger Meggs comic book annual had turned up and had proven popular with his mates. A few days later, Bert wrote again, this time more upbeat. ‘I daresay the newspapers at home have given quite a bit of prominence to the big attack Bomber Command made in support of Montgomery’s attack a few days ago. We enjoyed the distinction of being there, and, although we did not linger to enjoy the view, it was really a wonderful sight.’

  Bert wanted a new watchband, and hoped that his family in Brisbane could find one with a brown leather cap that closed over the face of the watch. The band he had bought in Maryborough towards the end of 1942 had proven invaluable in protecting his watch against knocks. He also had something else on his mind: his Derby girlfriend, Margaret Kay. His female cousins had wanted to know more about the relationship. ‘Perhaps the information that the Derby one makes very neat job of darning my socks may provide a crumb of comfort. She is a very nice girl, but I am a little alarmed at the apparent interest I have caused in home circles. After all, dash it all . . .’ he added bashfully. And there was a photograph of the whole crew on its way. Bert warned them not to expect it any time soon, as it was going ordinary mail.

  In March 1944, Jim Rowland was posted to the Pathfinder 635 Squadron RAF, at Downham Market, Norfolk—firm acknowledgement of his skill as a pilot. The night after he arrived on the squadron, he flew his ‘second dickie’ to Frankfurt with RAF Squadron Leader Lionel Wheble. He found it a ‘rather shaking experience’. Their target was the Opel tank works at Russelsheim, on the outskirts of Frankfurt, which was building Tiger tanks. Near the target, a Halifax went up in flames before Jim’s eyes. There were no parachutes as the silhouetted wreck fell blazing out of the sky. ‘Poor bastard,’ Jim’s pilot said.

  Ahead, over the target, Jim saw a bomber trapped in a cone of searchlights ‘like a giant moth twisting and turning in a spiderweb’, fighting to escape as the flak bursts closed in. Finally it fled the relentless beams in a screaming dive. Almost beside him, another aircraft was hit, and the flames from an engine grew by the second until they engulfed the wing and fuselage. Then it too entered that slow, flaming death arc, dropping down the sky in a blaze of burning fuel.

  Shells burst in a rapidly expanding ball of greasy black smoke with a violent white and bright orange and red core, hurling shrapnel hundreds of feet. A Lancaster had to be held in steady, straight and balanced flight for three minutes before bomb release, making it a perfect target for both fighters and flak. But as night fighters attacked other Lancasters, Jim’s crew managed to get their bombs away and return home safely.

  Now, in late July, a raid to Kiel, the great shipbuilding city on the Baltic at the head of the Kiel canal, approached. Jim wondered how best to prepare his crew, whose only experience was flying on raids over France, for a German target. It was said that the most dangerous trips for most crews were the first five, when you didn’t know anything, and the last five, when you were close to the end.

  Kiel was where the Germans were developing a new U-boat with a Schnorchel, a retractable pipe that supplied air to the diesel engines while the sub was at periscope depth, allowing the boat to cruise and recharge its batteries while maintaining a degree of stealth. Schnorchelequipped U-boats would be extremely difficult to find once at sea, and thus constituted a grave new threat to the Allies.

  Jim knew his crew must have heard all sorts of lurid tales from the others in their huts, and that they would be watching for any signs of fear in their pilot. ‘I wondered what on earth I could tell my crew. It had been so much more dramatic, so much more tense and violent, than I had imagined, and I had been scared witless.’ He decided that the best approach was to treat everything as perfectly normal and all in a day’s work, though this raid was bound
to be quite different from their experience over France.

  Flying in their Pathfinder role, they were in the vanguard of the long trail of aircraft streaming out over southern England on 23 July. This had become an extraordinary nightly spectacle: huge black insects trailing across the sunset sky, gradually coalescing into a vast swarm up to a thousand strong. The sleepy English landscape filled with the distant, steady drumming of Merlin engines. It reminded Jim ‘of the way cicadas fill the afternoons with sound in a hot summer at home’.

  The climb was uneventful, but as Jim and his crew crossed the North Sea coast of the Jutland peninsula, heading for Kiel on the Baltic coast, they saw the first aircraft shot down. Soon the bomb aimer said he could see the Kiel shipyards. They started their bombing run, and in that moment a searchlight found them—then another, then another. The lights were blinding, and Jim couldn’t see a thing. He remembered that poor struggling moth over Frankfurt, but there was nothing to do now but continue the run. As flak burst all around them, the bomb aimer said, ‘Steady . . . steady . . .’ Jim felt anything but. Then, after what seemed an eternity, the aircraft bucked as the bomb aimer called, ‘Bombs gone. Bomb doors closed.’ To Jim, these were the ‘sweetest words of all’.

  They had dropped six 2000-pounders from 16,000 feet. He gave the Lancaster full throttle, pushed the stick hard forward, full rudder, full aileron, then the reverse as the controls took effect. After an age of twisting and dodging, they finally lost the searchlights and set about regaining some height and finding their way home. In the morning, they found that three out of sixteen of the squadron’s aircraft had not returned. Jim’s mentor from the Frankfurt ‘second dickie’, Squadron Leader Lionel Wheble, had been shot down. He was now a prisoner of war, but at least he had survived. Nonetheless, the Committee of Adjustment would be visiting the huts of the missing crew during the day to collect their personal belongings. For Jim, the thought of this was always ‘a rather sombre business’.

  30

  NO BACKWARD GLANCES

  Noel Eliot’s home was a camp hidden in the Fréteval forest near Châteaudun. The tents were set among trees and thick undergrowth, with branches spread over them to camouflage them further. Noel slept on straw but at least he had blankets. Here he lived with seventy other English, Canadian and American airmen. In the days after D-Day, all anxiously awaited rescue by the invasion troops.

  A Belgian airman named Lucien was in charge of the camp, which had been set up by the Comète network. His surname was Boussa, but for security reasons the men did not know that name, or the surname of any other Resistance member. When the Germans occupied Belgium, Lucien had escaped to England, where he flew fighters with the RAF. Later, he was parachuted into France to help organise camps like this one.

  The second-in-charge was a Belgian Army officer who had gone underground after the invasion of his country. His real name was Baron Jean de Blommaert de Soye, but to the camp residents he was only ‘Big John’. The average helper on an escape line was captured within ninety days, but Big John had worked with the Comète network since 1940. He had many aliases and was known to the Germans as ‘The Fox’. His code name with MI9 was ‘Rutland’. The Gestapo had put a price on his head. After narrowly escaping a trap set by a traitor in the Underground, he was evacuated to England. Later, like Lucien, he was parachuted back into France to help organise the camps for Allied airmen. In collaboration with the local Resistance members, Big John and Lucien organised food supplies and security. All the men in the camp had the greatest respect and admiration for them.

  By 1944, the various Resistance movements in France had an estimated 100,000 members—more than double the number a year earlier. By the spring of 1944, there were sixty cells focused solely on collecting intelligence; other cells carried out acts of sabotage. In the build-up to D-Day, the work of the Resistance was vital. In May 1944 alone, it sent 3000 written and 700 wireless intelligence reports to the Allies. Between April and May, it also destroyed 1800 railway engines—only 600 fewer than those destroyed by Allied bombers.

  Lucien and Big John were funded from England. There were francs in abundance: to Noel, the British seemed to be printing notes with an abandon bordering on recklessness. Lucien chose an RAF gunnery leader to take charge of the camp when he was away. Noel thought that the officer left much to be desired. ‘He was mainly noted for lying in his tent and eating the minute supply of chocolate that he was supposed to distribute to the rest of the inhabitants,’ he recalled. As the camp’s population grew, a meeting was held and Noel was elected as second-in-command. He was known to the Americans, who formed a majority of the evaders in the camp, as ‘Aussie’.

  Evaders were usually collected from the station at Châteaudun and walked to the forest at night. Horse-drawn carts and cycles were also used; evaders arriving by cart were given pitchforks to reinforce the impression they were farm labourers. A woman who lived in view of the main approach to the forest kept a pile of wood and leaves at her home ready to light as a warning fire. There was a well-organised system of guards, who were rostered for duty every twenty-four hours. Several guard posts were set up at strategic points around the perimeter of the forest, each manned by two men for four hours at a time. If any Germans were sighted in or near the forest, one man was to stay and watch them while the other ran to warn the camp. A guard post was also situated about a kilometre from the camp to interrogate all new arrivals.

  A rough bush shed made of branches served as a kitchen. Charcoal was used for cooking, as this did not create much smoke. Two Americans who had either been chefs or had experience with cooking were appointed to prepare meals. There was a daily roster for kitchen-help duties. Noel thought the two Americans did a pretty good job, though they had little to work with but beans and more beans. Breakfast was usually bread fried in butter, sometimes with an egg. ‘We made coffee by putting barley in a frying pan, shaking it about over the fire until it was almost black, and then crushing it. Any resemblance to real coffee would be mainly in the imagination, but it was better than drinking water,’ Noel recalled.

  With food scarce, one day Lucien bought a yearling steer from the nearby farm. The catch was that it was alive and had to be killed and dressed at the farm. Noel was the only camp resident with a clue how to go about the job, which was made harder by the requirement that the animal could not be shot lest the Germans hear the noise. ‘Somehow or other we got the job done,’ Noel recalled, and for the next few days they ate like kings. Horse-drawn carts delivered occasional chickens and other foods, while a doctor and the barber from nearby Cloyes paid weekly visits. The badly injured, most of whom had burns, were cared for in the homes of local Resistance members.

  One of the biggest security problems was keeping the noise level down, particularly in the evening, when everyone would sit around and ‘beat the gums’, as the Americans called it. To Noel, ‘it was the Yanks who always seemed to talk the loudest’. ‘The part of the forest that we were in was not very wide and on a calm evening or night we could hear the voices of the German soldiers as they went along the nearby road to do their guard duties on the ammunition dumps that were in other parts of the forest.’

  The shortage of cigarettes was another big problem, and caused considerable dissension. There was a ration of about five smokes a day for each man, but this left many unsatisfied, and they resorted to rolling up dry leaves and bark. Big John became so concerned about the cigarette situation that he asked the local Resistance group for help. One of its leaders, who was chief of the gendarmerie in Cloyes, broke into a tobacconist’s shop and stole eight kilograms of cigarettes. Once, a desperate young American went to a nearby village to try and get some cigarettes. This infuriated his fellow evaders, for it endangered the whole camp. No one was angrier than Big John, who told the American, ‘I will break your back if you do that again.’

  Guard duties and kitchen parade kept some of the men occupied each day, but for the others the time dragged. A bulletin board was placed in t
he centre of the camp with the aim of keeping up morale, but the men had to find ways of keeping themselves occupied. One of the most popular pastimes was whittling, and some fancy walking sticks and other carvings were produced with the aid of a pocket knife and unlimited spare time. Near the camp was an open grassy patch that the men called Piccadilly Circus. On sunny days, many of them would strip off and sun bake there, Noel Eliot among them.

  Often lying there in the sun, we would watch the formations of American Flying Fortresses and Liberators flying high overhead and being attacked by the German fighters, and they in turn being engaged by the Allied fighters escorting the bombers. As we watched we would often see a bomber slowly dropping out of the formation with increasing amounts of smoke coming from it, spiralling with increasing speed towards the ground. As we watched it go down, the usual comment was ‘Poor bastards!’ It was an unreal sort of experience to be relaxing there in an enemy occupied country, watching our own planes being shot down. Probably some of the survivors—if any—could finish up in our camp.

  There seemed to be two separate Resistance groups in the area, one Communist and the other not. The members of both groups were armed and determined-looking. It seemed that their ‘rank’ depended on the number of Germans they had killed. At this time, most of the German convoys moved at night, as Allied fighters patrolled most of the roads during the day. ‘Those in charge of our camp tried to persuade the Resistance boys to practise their nocturnal sport well away from the camps so as not to attract the Germans to our area, but there were nights when we could hear volleys of shots not very far away,’ Noel recalled.