by Peter Rees
In all, twenty Tallboys were dropped. The Tirpitz caught fire amidships and soon the aircrews heard a large explosion. A huge hole was blown in the ship’s side and bottom, destroying the belt armour abreast of where the bomb hit. Within ten minutes, the ship was listing at forty degrees, then sixty. A few minutes later, a large explosion rocked an aft turret. The roof flew twenty-five metres into the air, then crashed onto a group of men swimming to shore. Suddenly, as a tremendous explosion ripped through the hull, the Tirpitz heaved violently before rolling over, its superstructure buried in the sea floor. John Holden recalled that they were filming at about 5000 feet when the rear gunner suddenly yelled, ‘Turn around, Buck, she’s tipped over!’ ‘Apparently the damage had been done on the port side of the battleship; she took in water, and that toppled her over. But she didn’t sink, because of her high superstructure and the shallow depth of the fjord prevented her from sinking. But she was certainly down in such a position that we could see the red paint on her keel.’
Bruce took the Lancaster down low to film the last moments of the Tirpitz. ‘We flew over it, around it, all about it and still it sat there with dignity under a huge mushroom of smoke which plumed up a few thousand feet in the air. There were fires and more explosions on board; a huge gaping hole existed on the port side where a section had been blown out.’ As the Tirpitz turned over, Bruce flew over the waves at fifty feet. ‘We could see German sailors swimming, diving, jumping, and by the time she was over to eighty-five degrees and subsiding slowly into the water of Tromsø Fjord, there must have been the best part of sixty men on her side as we skimmed over for the last pass.’ At least 1600 men of the 3500 aboard were lost. For John Holden, watching the demise of the Tirpitz was a highlight of his tour—‘chasing something that we missed twice and finally got it on the third time’. Besides the three separate attacks, it had taken seventy-six Tallboys to sink the Tirpitz.
On the way home the men could not suppress their glee. ‘The purists would have been horrified if they could have seen inside our aircraft,’ Bob Barry recalled. ‘Vic Johnson, the engineer, was at the controls and Ernie Weaver and Jack Sayers, the bomb aimer and pilot, were in the bombing hatch with the cover removed popping away with Smith and Wesson six-shooters at startled petrels and albatrosses. The birds were fairly safe from these inexpert marksmen, but the North Atlantic was subjected to a terrible pounding!’
In the 1970s, Bruce Buckham, who returned to BHP and became its Queensland manager, published an article about the sinking of the Tirpitz in the company’s magazine. A former German navy signaller, John Troeger, who was working for BHP at Kwinana, in Western Australia, read the article and responded with his own account. John had been a signaller on the Tirpitz when the Allied bombers struck. That morning, he wrote, there seemed to be an ‘endless stream of bombers’. Then suddenly, bombs were exploding in the water around the battleship. The bomb that landed amidships blew John over the side. There was ‘one tremendous explosion on board’ when a bomb hit the ammunition store aft.
The Tirpitz did seem to leap out of the water as the magazine went up. It blew a huge hole through the side of the ship. By this time there were men everywhere in the water, it was bitterly cold and black smoke was billowing over everything. Then I remember another bomb hitting the waterline alongside. The suction pulled the ship sideways. It stayed there for what seemed a very long time, but water was pouring in through the hole in the side and it suddenly keeled over and slid bow first into the harbour sand. That was the end of the Tirpitz.
A motor torpedo boat eventually rescued John. Grimy and freezing, he was taken to Tromsø, where he and other survivors were cleaned up and given dry clothes and an injection against infection before being ordered back to the Tirpitz for rescue work. ‘We spent from ten at night until four next afternoon, cutting holes in the two-inch thick nickel-steel keel to free engineers trapped by the water. It was hard work in the wintry conditions but in one case I saw 45 men climb out of a hole we cut.’
After their reminiscences were published, John Troeger and Bruce Buckham were able to meet. The German-Australian recalled seeing what must have been Bruce’s Lancaster sweeping low over the stricken battleship just after he was pulled from the water by rescue crews. ‘A single aircraft came back and circled overhead a couple of times at very low level. I remember saying, “There they are, they’ve come back to make sure we are really finished.” It must have been the camera plane.’
37
THE SPECIAL DUTIES BOYS
Angus Cameron, from Wee Waa in New South Wales, was intrigued when he found himself posted to a shadowy unit in Bomber Command. Their role was to outsmart the Luftwaffe. Angus had been a laboratory assistant in a Sydney chemical company when he enlisted in October 1942 to train as a RAAF wireless operator/air gunner. When his mother heard of his new role, she said, ‘You are now a WAG, you have been a wag all your life.’ She would probably have agreed that the task assigned to Angus when he joined 214 Squadron RAF as a Flight Sergeant in September 1944 suited the twenty-year-old’s temperament.
The squadron was part of No. 100 Group, which had been formed the previous December and given responsibility for electronic warfare, and for controlling all radio countermeasures and bomber-support activities. The group’s formation followed closely on the successful introduction of Window, and its goal was to jam or confuse the German radar network and ground communication system so that night fighters could not be easily vectored onto the approaching bomber stream. As pioneers in the secret ‘black art’ of electronic warfare, members of 100 Group were described as performing ‘special duties’.
Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland, who as General Inspector of the German Fighter Arm was in charge of German day and night fighters in 1944–45, attributed a decline in night-fighter success in this period to ‘a shortage of fuel, and the activities of the RAF No. 100 Group’. The Luftwaffe was finding it increasingly difficult to direct night fighters to the Allied bombers, because 100 Group had learned how to cut the ground-to-air radio links on which they depended.
When 100 Group was formed, RAF planners were worried about the vulnerability of the aircraft being used to send out jamming signals. They feared the enemy would home in on these signals, exposing 100 Group planes when operating over enemy territory. For this reason, the RAF decided to supply relevant squadrons—including Angus’s—with USAAF B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ and B-24 ‘Liberator’ bombers. The B-17 could not only reach a much higher altitude than the Lancaster, at just over 35,000 feet, but it was also better armed—if considerably slower.
Angus’s Flying Fortress crew at Oulton, Norfolk, included three other Australians—Pilot Officer Charles Miflin, a twenty-eight-year-old from Brisbane, who operated the jamming equipment; Flying Officer Basil Coates, a twenty-four-year-old from Sydney; and thirty-one-year-old bomb aimer Warrant Officer Phil Troutbeck, from Warracknabeal, in Victoria. Because the Fortress did not carry bombs, Phil’s role was changed to helping with navigation, observation and jamming equipment.
The B-17’s firepower was something for which Angus was grateful during the several attacks made on their Fortress. ‘We had six fifty-calibre machine-guns which is a lot better than the .303s in the Lancasters. You had tracers coming towards you but our gunners were very good, they used to all fire furiously in all directions and we never sustained any damage.’
Painted like other RAF night-flying aircraft, the Fortresses were modified to carry all the specialised equipment. Unlike the USAAF versions, they had no heating, so the crews wore heating suits that plugged into the wall like an electric blanket. ‘There were no big leather jackets that other crews had,’ Angus recalled, ‘we just had electric suits over our battle dress, and helmets, of course.’ The more advanced internal American communication system was replaced with a British one whose microphone had be turned on and off manually, creating a problem for the gunners:
These poor fellows, standing there in a big hole at probably twenty-eight thousan
d feet, icy cold, covered in white frost and just hanging over their guns, looking out and hoping. If they wanted to talk to you, like, ‘Fighter, fighter,’ they had to turn this silly switch and it would be inevitably frozen. So every ten minutes the skipper would check, which meant they had to turn it on to speak and if one didn’t speak I used to get despatched down to see what was wrong with him.
In September 1944, Angus began the first of his thirty-five ops. He undertook normal radio duties while Charles Miflin, the special wireless operator, who sat next to him, operated the jamming frequencies. ‘We’d go virtually with the Pathfinders,’ Angus recalled. ‘When they were marking, you’d jam the anti-aircraft radar, the gun-range radars, the searchlight radars and of course the fighters if they were coming up. We had a bomb bay full of radio-electronic equipment, [though] none of us ever knew what it did.’
Flying mostly at around 25,000 feet, Angus’s crew threw out a protective electronic ‘cloak’ to help conceal an attack by a bomber stream 5000 feet below them. Other aircraft created false radar echoes of spoof and decoy raids by nonexistent ‘ghost’ squadrons using Window and other devices. No. 100 Group also flew Beaufighters and Mosquitos, with airborne radar for tracking and destroying German night fighters.
From the start of the war, both Britain and Germany used ground-based radar to detect approaching aircraft. British radar stations had played a vital role in detecting Luftwaffe bombers and had helped the RAF win the Battle of Britain. The Germans had developed Freya, a long-range radar system able to detect approaching aircraft at a distance of 160 kilometres. This enabled the German defences to be alerted as soon as the first bombers began circling for height over RAF bases. Armed with this information, the defenders could be preparing to strike the bomber stream with all the force they could muster long before the bombers reached the enemy coast. The RAF’s challenge was to blindfold the Freya stations—something achieved with a jammer code-named Mandrel.
It became standard practice, even when bad weather stopped operations over Europe, to string a line of orbiting 100 Group aircraft at a reasonably safe distance off the enemy coast and set up an unbroken Mandrel screen. The 20,000-feet-high electronic curtain completely blocked the probing beams emitted by the Freya stations, causing their monitors to yield nothing but a deluge of ‘snow’.
The Germans had also installed a chain of the much more sensitive and accurate Würzburg radar antennas stretching the length of western Germany. The Würtzburg dishes had an effective range of forty kilometres, and fed accurate information on aircraft numbers, course and altitude to the German night-fighter controllers and anti-aircraft defences. Würzburg presented a different technical problem from Freya, one that was dealt with by using Window to flood the receivers with realistic-looking aircraft echoes. The tinfoil strips were cut to a specific length directly related to the wavelength used by Würzburg stations. Angus and his colleagues found, ‘chucking . . . Window out’ extremely effective.
When a package of Window was dropped from an aircraft, it immediately blossomed out, and the dense cluster of tinfoil strips reflected back an echo on the Würzburg which was virtually impossible to distinguish from the echo returned by real aircraft. Six Fortresses throwing out lots of Window at regular times could seem like a very sizeable force of a hundred aircraft, so the German controllers would have to make decisions. We had to keep on doing that to keep [them] in a quandary as long as possible.
British scientists also developed the Tinsel system, with which a microphone in a bomber’s engine bay recorded the roar of the engine and the wireless operator transmitted it on German ground-to-air radio frequencies. Known as jostling, this practice made it impossible for night fighters to speak to their controllers.
RAF personnel who spoke German would also tune in to Luftwaffe night fighters’ radio frequencies and give false and misleading instructions. If fighters were on the way, Angus would receive a Morse message from Group Headquarters in Britain revealing the fighters’ operating frequency. He would give this to wireless operator Miflin, who would sometimes transmit false information on Allied bomber positions to the German fighters while Angus listened skeptically: ‘Well, of course, it didn’t work, because the moment he opened his mouth they’d know he was Australian, for God’s sake. His German was terrible, so very rarely would he do that, but the facility was there and he would do it for fun.’
The Germans came up with their own responses, at which Angus marvelled. When Bomber Command introduced a jamming technique known as ‘Airborne Cigar’, or ABC, in which three transmitters emitted continuous signals, ‘The Germans tried any number of devices to overcome the jamming—such as having their instructions sung by Wagnerian sopranos in an attempt to fool Bomber Command operators into thinking it was just a civilian channel and not worth jamming. The operators, who spoke German, were soon wise to the ploy,’ Angus said.
From December 1944, the B-17s were required to circle a target area to provide jamming cover for the duration of an attack. A dangerous procedure, this was carried out within an eight-kilometre radius of the aiming point and could last up to fifteen minutes. In this way, three or four B-17 aircraft could successively give cover for a raid. However, Angus’s 214 Squadron took heavy casualties: for a while they were losing about one Fortress on every raid. The crews suspected—correctly, as it turned out—that the Germans had recovered some radar equipment from a downed Fortress and used it to develop a means of homing in on the squadron’s transmissions. The use of certain radar devices, including H2S and Monica, was stopped, and the loss rate fell back to normal.
Angus had no doubt that overall the new tactics were successful, and that they brought a significant reduction in Bomber Command’s losses. ‘However, on some targets it was extremely difficult to mislead the German defenders, either by routing or jamming, and whenever their night fighters managed to get into the bomber stream, they exacted a punishing toll,’ he recalled. While the squadron made the German controllers’ task infinitely more difficult, the enemy fighter pilots were ‘as tenacious as bulldogs and were antagonists of formidable skill and courage’. To Angus, they defended Germany with the same courage and determination as Allied aircrews showed in attacking it. The Germans of Hogan’s Heroes they were not.
38
SMOKE PUFFS AND FLAK BARRAGES
Alick Roberts had completed three bomber raids when he learned of the hoodoo: no Australian had ever completed a tour of operations with No. 44 Squadron. Forty-six had been killed. Perhaps, he thought, this was why an unprecedented number of Australians, including the crew he was in, were among the recent arrivals. Maybe the influx was an attempt to ‘swamp’ out of existence the jinx on Australians. He took heart from the ground crew, who regarded Lancaster ‘J for Jig’ as their own. The squadron, they boasted, had ‘never lost a Jig on operations’.
On 11 December 1944, Alick and his crew set out in Jig for a daylight attack on the Urft dam involving 233 Lancasters of 5 Group and five Mosquitos of 8 Group.
On a beautiful run in with little call for correction I was astern of another Lancaster at just a nice distance to watch his bomb doors open and then his bombs start to fall before I went into my act. I counted seven bombs clear of his bomb bay when suddenly he just disappeared in a huge explosion. Moments after my release we were in his smoke. By then it was just black smoke but even at the time of the explosion and immediately after I saw very little debris.
Six weeks earlier, Alick had lost the first of his Australian airman mates. On 29 October, twenty-year-old pilot Dave Church and his crew from 207 Squadron RAF, including an English friend, navigator Col Whitehead, whose family had sheep stations in Australia, were killed in battle over Norway. Dave and Alick had been through training together and had many interests in common. They and Col had planned to get together, but operations had always seemed to stand in the way. Then there were navigators Bill Kinloch and Os Mountford. Shortly before the Urft dam raid, Alick had landed on Thorney Island, on the Engl
ish south coast, home to 464 Squadron RAAF, to which Bill and Os were posted.
Next morning down near the hangars before departure I heard a voice calling my name and on looking about there was Os Mountford, newly commissioned as a Pilot Officer. He made me green with envy recounting the interesting work they were doing. He told me that Bill Kinloch had taken part in a much-publicised recent ‘jail-break’ attack on the Aarhus Gestapo Headquarters and prison in Denmark which resulted in the escape of a number of Resistance personnel held by the Gestapo. That was to be my last meeting with Os. He received the DFC shortly thereafter.
Later, Alick received news from home about Bill and Os. Bill’s Mosquito had been shot down and crashed near Niederpruem, in the Rhineland, on 13 January 1945. Os’s Mosquito had hit a church in Hampshire while returning from a sortie over the Ruhr early on the morning of 4 February. The deaths devastated Alick.
We had become inured to seeing from time to time the names of crews we knew at least by sight wiped off the board in the briefing room. When it came to Dave Church and his crew it hit me very hard. News of the loss of Os Mountford and Bill Kinloch came weeks later. I found that I was thenceforth unable to form the occasional close friendships that I had been in the habit of forming right from my early school days.