Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  On the morning of 12 August 1944 Rollo stood in front of about thirty crews, Alick among them, in the station cinema at Wigsley. To Alick he was ‘a seemingly rather pompous wing commander in RAAF uniform’. ‘His opening words were, “My name is ROLLO—KINGSFORD-SMITH—to the Australians present that name should be significant”. Indeed he was a nephew of Sir Charles. He did not impress. Fortunately perhaps, that was the only occasion on which most of us saw him.’

  (They would meet again about twenty years later in Sydney and have business dealings during which Alick found Rollo ‘quite charming and friendly in his approach, addressed me formally by my rank at the time, and after the meetings always entertained my immediate superior from Melbourne and me to lunch in the boardroom. I don’t think I ever referred to our first meeting.’)

  The initial meeting with Rollo over, Alick underwent intensive training as a bomb aimer on the Stirling. For Rollo, the pressures were different at Wigsley, but no less intense. Wigsley, with about forty aircraft and 700 aircrew, was the last link in the long training sequence for bomber crews, for whom there was a constant demand.

  The pressure to keep up the supply of highly trained airmen made for long working hours and a frantic pace. ‘We were churning people out like mad,’ Rollo said. ‘We worked twenty-four hours a day seven days a week and there was always pressure on me to turn out more crews.’ He soon found he was working twenty-five to thirty days in a row.

  The training was dangerous. Men from Wellington Operational Training Units got initial four-engine experience on Stirlings, which Rollo thought were ‘nasty unreliable aircraft . . . We had engine fires in the Stirlings and we killed a good few crews in training. Not something you should normally do but we were pushing them all the time and when something went wrong at night time the people weren’t ready to cope and they crashed.’

  If they survived the Stirlings, the trainees switched to Lancasters before graduating. Rollo used to talk to the young pilots, but on one occasion he was taken aback. ‘As the pilots were just about to graduate I had a yarn with them about what they wanted to do. One chap said, ‘Look sir, I don’t want to go to 463 Squadron.’ I said, “Why don’t you want to go to 463 Squadron?” “I am told the CO there is a right bastard.” I soon knocked that on the head.’

  Rollo knew he was playing a crucial role in turning out trained pilots. Freed of the trauma of German night fighters and flak, he made the most of his limited spare time in the first few months at Wigsley. ‘It was my fiefdom and although my working hours were long they were tailored to suit my convenience unless I was programmed for Base Controller duties, lectures to new courses or flying instructor checks.’

  Shortly after his arrival, Rollo held a party in the officers’ mess. Among the guests were some of his former Waddington and RAAF colleagues: Group Captain David Bonham-Carter and his wife, RAAF Wing Commander Arthur Doubleday and his new wife, and Wing Commanders Bill Brill, Bill Forbes and Keith Sinclair. ‘The food was excellent. Guests all enjoyed themselves,’ Rollo noted. The following night he entertained some ‘lovely scantily clad dancers and singers’ from the Entertainments National Service Association. Rollo observed that all the girls were chaperoned.

  A few weeks later, Bonham-Carter phoned to tell Rollo he had been awarded an immediate DSO. Later that night he made the thirty-minute drive to Waddington to celebrate the honour in the officers’ mess. There was a Commanding Officer’s parade the next morning at Wigsley; Rollo noted in his diary that he ‘felt poorly’. At least he got a personal letter of congratulations from Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris.

  Within a few weeks, Rollo’s health began to deteriorate. First there was hay fever, then colds that would not go away, and then asthma. He reflected on the changes in his lifestyle: at Waddington he had always been fighting fit, despite the stress of operations, the being shot at, and the drinking. ‘Maybe that was the reason,’ he concluded: ‘the fighting gave me regular large doses of adrenaline. At Wigsley I was never under fire and consequently no adrenaline. Maybe I was suffering withdrawal symptoms.’ Rollo unwound in the officers’ mess or a nearby village pub and drank too much.

  33

  LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

  Margaret Kay was in Derby contemplating the most difficult, and painful, letter she had ever written. Six days earlier, on 2 August 1944, her 467 Squadron wireless operator boyfriend, Flight Sergeant Bert Heap, had taken off from Waddington in Lancaster ND346 on a daylight raid to attack flying bomb facilities at Bois de Cassan in northern France. Nothing was heard from the aircraft after take off and it did not return to base. Margaret still held out hope as she wrote to Bert’s mother, two sisters and brother, in Brisbane.

  Dear Mrs Heap,

  Since hearing the terrible news that Bert did not return from last Wednesday’s ‘op’, my thoughts and sympathy have been constantly with you.

  I met Bert last Christmas while he was at Church Broughton, and since then we have seen a great deal of each other, have had many happy times together and he became my dearest friend.

  I have heard so much about you, Mrs Heap, Gladys, Jessie and Grenfell that I almost feel I know you and I do know how very much Bert means to you.

  Most of all Bert talked of you, he always thought of you when he saw a particularly lovely English scene of green fields and trees or a cottage garden full of flowers and wished that you were there to see them.

  I don’t know how much you have heard about last Wednesday. All I can get to know is that last Wednesday afternoon, 2 August, they were out over France and three of the planes were shot down, Bert’s being one of them.

  There is so little I can say to comfort you, only that Bert has been very happy while he has been here, he was not in the least worried about being on ‘ops’. He was always the same, so cheerful and such a grand person altogether that he was very popular and everyone loved him.

  I join with you in hoping and praying that Bert was spared when the plane crashed and that you will soon have some good news of him.

  Yours very sincerely

  Margaret Kay

  Seventeen aircraft from the squadron took part in the raid. Two, including Bert’s, collided and crashed at Boran-sur-Oise, near Chantilly. According to the squadron’s operations records book, the ‘aircraft collided and went straight down’. There were no survivors. For the Heap family, there was to be the standard sympathy card from the King:

  The Queen and I offer you our heartfelt sympathy in your great sorrow.

  We pray that your country’s gratitude for a life so nobly given in its service may bring you some measure of consolation.

  Some time later, the photo of Bert and his crew taken in July arrived at the family home in Brisbane. Later still, there would be photos of his grave in the Boran-sur-Oise Communal Cemetery, carefully tended by grateful French citzens.

  The daylight raid in which Bert had been killed had only been ordered because by August 1944 the Allies’ air supremacy enabled Bomber Command to operate both night and day. The RAF had started the war with the idea of daylight bombing, only to discover that the operational losses were too great to bear. The switch to night operations brought a furious search for technical aids to maximise the bombers’ accuracy in the dark. Now that the Luftwaffe was in retreat and anti-aircraft sites in Western Europe had been overrun, the blind navigational aids had been rendered, for all practical purposes, redundant.

  On 24 August Paris was liberated; most of Belgium followed by early September, and the first American troops reached the German border on 10 September. But an early Allied attempt to bypass the Siegfried Line—a chain of defensive obstacles stretching along the border from Switzerland to the coast of the Netherlands—failed; Hitler had the line heavily reinforced, and the Allied advance slowed.

  Bomber Command was ordered to remain ready to answer any calls for direct assistance to ground forces. At the same time, the decision was taken to concentrate its attacks on Germany’s synthetic oil plants, with secondary atten
tion paid to German rail and waterways, and tank and motor vehicle factories. These specific targets were to take precedence over cities.

  From mid-September, concentrated attacks were mounted on the Calais area with the aim of taking the port. Twenty-year-old 463 Squadron pilot Allan Stutter, from Sydney, was on a raid over Calais when he had to take his Lancaster down to 1700 feet to bomb. ‘We were bombing in daylight, low-level, and I found myself coming over the target on my own, attracting all the anti-aircraft fire, and it was at a moment like that you wished you were somewhere else. I thought we were gone then.’

  Having survived the attack, he flew back to base only to find that rain had left a sheet of water over the runway, creating landing problems. Aircraft that had returned with their bomb loads intact had little trouble landing on a wet surface because of the extra weight of the bombs. Allan quickly realised he had a problem.

  We were five or six tons lighter and we didn’t have the weight so we simply hydroplaned over the top of the water. The brakes were not working. I said to the engineer to turn the motors off straight away. I was juggling things around. All of a sudden they started to work and I just managed to stop it before it ran off the end of the runway into the mud. Poised on the edge.

  On 28 September Calais fell, and shortly afterwards all the French Channel ports were in Allied hands.

  Germany’s night fighter force may have been in decline, but it could still strike fear in the hearts of bomber crews. They especially hated the ME 110s, which would approach from behind and beneath, exploiting the Lancaster’s blind spot. On the night of 29 August 1944, 463 Squadron navigator Eric Rosenfeld was on the last trip of his tour, in one of 189 Lancasters from 5 Group sent to bomb Königsberg, in East Prussia. Because of the extreme range of the attack, only 480 tons of bombs could be carried, but the bombers caused severe damage in one of 5 Group’s most successful attacks. On the return flight, when Eric was lying in the bomb aimer’s position, a night fighter suddenly came up underneath the Lancaster. Eric was terrified, but he quickly realised the German pilot had no idea the Lancaster was above him. But then he saw the pilot look up and, seeing the bomber, quickly drop away. Eric and his crew made it safely back to England, and Eric’s airborne operations were over.

  The Luftwaffe threat extended to home soil, with intruder attacks occurring without warning at bomber stations across England. H.M. ‘Nobby’ Blundell, a senior Flight Sergeant engine fitter on 463 Squadron at Waddington, was a wheat farmer from Weethalle in central-western New South Wales who experienced one such attack—one that came with a twist on the night of 12 September 1944 when Luftwaffe raiders followed Lancasters returning to Waddington from a raid. Somehow they avoided detection by the ‘Identify Friend or Foe’ (IFF) system on the English coast and attacked the station as the bombers readied for landing. Nobby had ridden out on a bicycle to the aircraft dispersal area, armed only with a torch, when the drama unfolded. ‘One very unsociable JU-88 fired a string of cannon shells across my own dispersal area and damaged our flight crew truck which was about to pick up returning air crew,’ he recalled. With the base plunged into darkness, another intruder suddenly appeared with guns blazing. Nobby ‘bit the bitumen’ as he was knocked off his bike, jagged pieces of runway hitting his face. He was taken to hospital where a gash was stitched up.

  Shortly after, Nobby discovered there was a German intruder pilot, who had been shot down on the raid, lying in the bed next to him. He was under RAF guard. Nobby looked at the man, dumbfounded. ‘Holy hell! It’s you, Hans.’ The German in the adjacent bed had been Nobby’s neighbouring farmer at Weethalle, who had disappeared from his farm as war loomed. Hans told Nobby: ‘I received a call from the Fatherland in early 1939 to go back and fight for Germany. I trained to be a pilot and here I am as your guest in the Motherland.’ Whether Hans was the JU-88 pilot who caused Nobby’s wounds was never established.

  The Stirling was the biggest aircraft Alick Roberts had seen close up, and it seemed huge. ‘With its long fuselage and its bulbous nose high in the air, on the ground it reminded one of a praying mantis,’ he thought. But Stirlings were already outdated, and they flew their last raid on 8 September 1944, as Alick completed his training. A week later, Alick and his new crew left Wigsley for No. 5 Lancaster Finishing School, at nearby Syerston.

  Alick was impressed: ‘We were introduced to an aircraft which barring external interference or gross mishandling was virtually without fault.’ After five weeks, they were ready for operations. On 21 October Alick and the crew were posted to No. 44 Squadron (Rhodesia) RAF at Spilsby, Lincolnshire. Most of the unit’s members were either Rhodesian or South African. As he prepared for his first day of duty, Alick reflected on what lay ahead.

  We had volunteered for war; we had trained for it long and at great expense to our own nation and to Britain; I believe that during the training we had also been conditioned to war. ‘You are expendable,’ we had been told time and again. The likelihood that we would not survive a tour, or at most a second tour of operations had been made patently clear; a small few had withdrawn in various ways; the majority of us had accepted this, many I believe from the time they had volunteered.

  At heart we knew the chances were slim. We had been conditioned by then not to worry. To me and to all others I knew, it was a fact of life; none of us lost sleep over it. Doubtless as we set out on each operation most prayed in their own ways, but that was something normally private.

  Alick had spent two years, three months and two weeks of happy training and travelling and flown a total of 352 hours and eighteen minutes to prepare for a tour of operations that, while he did not know it at the time, would take five months and seven days to complete.

  As he made ready for his first operation, a postman delivered a letter to the mother of 460 Squadron rear gunner Tom Lynch at her home in Ipswich, Queensland. All she knew of her fair-haired thirty-two-year-old son was that he had been missing for six months, since he and his crew set out from RAF Station Binbrook on the night of 27 April 1944 on a raid to the German industrial city of Friedrichshafen.

  The day they left, the expatriate Australian artist Stella Bowen had begun a series of pencil sketches of Tom and the rest of the crew. Six of the seven were Australians; the engineer was English. Preoccupied with their flight preparations, they paid no particular attention to Bowen as she drew them in front of a Lancaster in full flying gear, with Mae West life jackets, helmets and headphones. Bowen would complete the painting when she returned to her London studio.

  Tom’s Lancaster was shot down in the vicinity of Lahr, near the Swiss border. He survived the crash but remained unconscious until 4 May, when he awoke in a German Air Force hospital in Baden-Baden. A German doctor told him the rest of the crew had been killed. Badly injured himself, Tom could remember nothing of the flight or the crash. Surgery followed to amputate his right leg below the knee.

  Tom found that away from the fighting, the flame of human decency still flickered. A doctor asked if he had written to his parents. When he said no, the doctor brought a pen and paper, and posted the letter for him. But the letter was delayed and for the next few months Tom was listed as ‘Missing presumed dead’.

  As he recuperated, Tom was taken by surprise one day when two outpatients came back to the ward after having a few drinks. Thinking Tom was English, they set upon him. ‘They had their hands around my throat going to choke me,’ he recalled later. A nurse intervened, and the Germans were forced to stop taking the war literally into their own hands.

  Tom was moved to another hospital at Frankfurt, but on the rail trip RAF aircraft swooped in. ‘All the passengers left the train and went in to the hills and left me in the carriage on my own, for the RAF to bomb us.’ In Frankfurt, he was collected by an ambulance whose driver told Tom that his own family were living in Australia and that he hoped they were all right. Tom ‘assured him they would be’.

  Over the next six months, Tom received blood transfusions from captured American airme
n before being sent to a Luftwaffe convalescent camp, Stalag IX-C, to await repatriation. ‘They made me an elementary leg which consisted of a boot and two iron bars with a round ring to put the stump in,’ he said later.

  It was during this time that the postman handed the letter, by now worn and dirty, to Tom’s mother. ‘She was thinking I was dead. What a shock she had,’ Tom said. She immediately told the RAAF that Tom was alive. In February 1945 he was repatriated in a prisoner swap between Germany and the Allies. ‘We were sent down through Switzerland to Marseilles and we were exchanged for German prisoners in Marseilles harbour and taken back to England.’ But he would not return to Australia for another year.

  34

  THE CLAIRVOYANT

  Jim Rowland and his crew were proud of the coveted gold Pathfinder eagle they wore under their wings on the pocket flaps of their ‘best blue’ uniform. The American approach to decorations was different:

  Only those among us who had already completed a tour of operations, and the very occasional person unlucky enough to get himself into a situation from which he got an immediate award, wore any ribbons at all at that time, unlike the Americans, who wore three or four ribbons even before they arrived in the ‘Thee-ater’. So for the great majority of us, the little gold eagle was our first decoration, and our first outward indication that we had been in action. We were very proud of it. We didn’t wear it on battledress, of course—it would hardly have helped us during any interrogation by the opposition.