by Peter Rees
Jim’s thirty-fourth operation was to be a raid on Hanau, an important German railway hub just east of Frankfurt on the night of 6 January, 1945. He had a ‘strange and uneasy feeling’ that he could not put down to anything in particular. Jim warned the gunners to keep their eyes peeled as they flew. With no moon and not a light to be seen, the world looked like a black velvet blanket. Suddenly, strings of white parachute flares lit up the ground below to enable the master bomber or his deputy to see the target. Jim saw the vague outlines of streets under snow. He began turning left to come around over the target for the bombing run. They were on time and on track. After dropping the first bombs, and still carrying one 4000-pound and four 1000-pound bombs as well as their target indicators, Jim was about to turn onto a new course when, just as he closed the bomb-bay doors,
A blacker shadow suddenly materialised right in front of us, grew in a second to the huge outline of an aircraft, and hit us with tremendous violence. There was barely time to register what had happened, let alone take any action to avoid it. Then our aircraft set out on its own crazed and uncontrollable gyrations, and I realised sickly what must have happened—we had collided with another aircraft. The starboard wing was gone outboard of the inner engine, and there was a tremendous roaring of wind over my head. No matter what I did with the controls, there was no response: they were slack. Looking behind, there seemed to be no mid-upper turret or fins—the tail was gone. This was it: the Lancaster would take us no farther—we had to get out of it immediately, before it reached the ground.
The Lancaster had collided with a Halifax at 17,000 feet. The intercom was dead and the time was just after 1900 hours when Jim pressed the ‘Abandon Aircraft’ button to warn the crew to get out as fast as they could. The collision was so devastating that it tore off the rear of the fuselage, killing rear gunner Flight Sergeant Ren Whybrow and mid-upper gunner Flying Officer Charles Jelley instantly.
Jim yelled at flight engineer Bill Hill, in the cockpit beside him, to bail out by the nose escape hatch. Just then the shocked white face of navigator Mac Mackenzie appeared by his shoulder. Jim tried to hurry them, wondering if there would still be time for him to get out, as the crew, including air bomber Tom Yanovich of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, had to go before he could. He saw wireless operator Jim Donald, the last to go forward, reach the escape hatch. There was a ‘banshee scream’ of wind above his head as the altimeter unwound madly; the control arm was slack and useless. Jim was now upside down and could see fires rotating on the ground. As navigator and radio operator Jim Sindall in the eight-man Pathfinder crew started down the steps beside him, heading for the escape hatch, Jim saw the vague dark outline of trees against a lightening background and realised that it was too late for him to get out.
In desperation I released my harness, and without thinking pushed upward hard to the canopy frame where the dinghy hatch had been above my head. Suddenly there was a wrenching wind which seemed to tear me out of my seat, a great bang, and I was outside the wreck. I saw the treetops rushing up, and must have pulled my parachute ripcord by reflex without thinking. In the same moment branches tore at me, and my fall stopped, as the parachute caught in the tree from which I found myself suspended about ten feet above the snow. The wreck landed with a great crash nearby. And it was cold.
Jim undid his parachute release and fell to the ground, landing in about forty-five centimetres of snow. He floundered over to the blazing wreck, then remembered that it still held four tons of bombs, unless they had been thrown clear in the collision or the subsequent gyrations. Jim hoped some of the boys had managed to bail out on the way down, but he held out little hope for Jim Sindall and Jim Donald, as the plane had probably been near the ground by the time they got to the escape hatch. He saw no parachutes. ‘I realised there was going to be nothing I could do for them, except pray that they had got out by some miracle like mine,’ he recalled later.
Dogs began barking and he could see a line of lights approaching through the trees. Mindful of stories he had heard about Allied aircrews being strung up on telephone poles by angry mobs, Jim took off into a thick pine forest. It was not out of the question, he later realised, that the others in his crew who survived the collision and jumped ‘were possibly murdered by civilians or members of [the] search party’. Jim found a brook and ran alongside it for some distance to hide his scent. Gradually the lights disappeared, the yelping faded, and he felt he was in the clear. But he knew he was more than 300 kilometres inside Germany, and he was beginning to learn just how dark and forbidding a European pine forest could be.
He decided to head towards the Rhine and the French frontier, as far and fast as he could in the snow, walking westward by night, hiding by day under large fallen logs and bushes. But he knew that in reality, his chance of escaping was very slim. That feeling only increased when he realised he had blundered into the outskirts of Frankfurt. He started to retrace his steps but, tired and hungry and down to just one bar of chocolate, he knew he would not be able to keep going over the extra distance. He decided to take his chances by walking through Frankfurt. Before long, a suspicious police officer arrested him.
He was handed over to the Gestapo at Offenbach, near Frankfurt. Interrogated as a spy, Jim refused to cooperate. The local Gestapo chief mimed the hangman’s noose, but Jim merely repeated his name, rank and serial number as he had been taught. His home for the next three weeks was cell 31, two metres wide by three high and three long, its only furniture a stool and a bucket. A single light in the ceiling stayed on day and night. That night he had his first meal for two days, a piece of black bread and a pannikin of hot soup. In the circumstances, he thought it was delicious, but he had never felt more lonely and desolate in his life. ‘Nor more uncomfortable, as I discovered the impossibility of finding a position in which to sleep on a bare floor when one’s hands are securely fastened behind one’s back. I realised that these feelings left me vulnerable, and resolved to be careful.’
In the cell next door was a Frenchman, Monsieur Albert Holz, the mayor of Metz, in Alsace, who had been held as a political prisoner since 1940. Having been imprisoned for so long, Albert was on good terms with the old warder in charge of the floor. Jim began communicating with him using his fractured schoolboy French.
It was Albert who a few days later talked the gaoler into fastening my handcuffs in front of me instead of behind my back, on condition that they were replaced immediately if anyone came, and this was the first of the many debts I owe him. It made it possible to lie flat and get some sleep, and made an incredible difference.
Though he had been in this awful place all those years, he had kept his senses of humour and humanity, and retained his balance through a great deal of adversity. I told him that I had scratched my name and number and the address of RAAF Headquarters in London on the wall of my cell, and he promised that he would check with them if he were still alive when the war ended, and do his best to have (Gestapo chief) Kraus brought to book if something untoward happened to me.
Meanwhile, Jim’s father in Australia received a letter from the commanding officer of Downham Market RAF Station, Norfolk, where Jim was based. Writing on 10 January, just days after he disappeared, the commander tried to buoy the family’s hopes. ‘Experience, up to the present, has shown that quite a proportion of our flying personnel who are reported missing in operations against the enemy, have managed to make a safe landing by parachute or in the aircraft itself. Therefore there must be some hope that he is safe and a prisoner in enemy hands,’ he wrote, unaware how accurate that was.
From the beginning of his captivity, Jim insisted that as a military officer he must be handed over to the Luftwaffe authorities. The Gestapo and the police had no right to hold him, least of all in handcuffs in solitary confinement in a civilian prison. This did not impress Jim’s captors, who charged him with espionage. Through Albert, he was able to get a message out, and an English-speaking lawyer came to see him. He listened to Jim’s tale and see
med quite sympathetic. However, he said, since Jim was a prisoner of the Gestapo, neither he nor anyone else could do anything about it. Jim asked him at least to contact the Luftwaffe, but he said the Gestapo chief would most likely take umbrage at such an action. He wished Jim ‘Guten Abend’, and left.
A few evenings later, towards the end of January, Albert scratched urgently on Jim’s door. ‘James,’ he said, ‘tomorrow morning they will come for you. You are to be shot as a spy.’
This of course was most cheerful news if it turned out to be right. I had been over and over all possible methods of escape from the gaol, and couldn’t find one. The only hope would be to get away en route to wherever they were going to take me, but that posed its problems of where to go and how to get food and what to do about the handcuffs and a few other things. There was nothing to do but wait.
At 4 a.m. there was a noise in the corridor and Jim’s cell door was unlocked. In marched two uniformed men. They were not in the black SS uniform but in a blue-grey one, which Jim thought might be that of the Luftwaffe. He was right. The communication line from Albert through the gaoler to the lawyer had seen the Luftwaffe informed that an enemy Air Force officer was not being treated as a prisoner in accordance with the terms of the Geneva Convention.
Under escort, Jim was taken back to Hanau, the town he had set out to bomb when he crashed. He noticed that there was a good deal of damage around the railway station, but the lines were open—or some of them, at least. ‘So much for trying to cut rail junctions with bombs—they can be reopened too quickly, especially if quantities of slave labour are available,’ he observed.
Jim was transferred to a Luftwaffe transit and interrogation camp at Oberursel, not far to the north of Frankfurt, and, with his handcuffs removed for the first time in weeks, locked in a solitary cell with a bed and blankets to replace bare floor. A warm wash, hot soup and coffee—albeit made from acorns—followed. If the Luftwaffe thought a grateful Jim would be compliant under interrogation, they were mistaken. He told them what he had been instructed to say: ‘The Geneva Convention, to which Germany is a signatory, requires me only to give my name, rank, and number. I cannot answer any of these other questions.’ But they soon worked out his background, and which squadron he came from. The interrogators told him they had found his aircraft and that his crew ‘have told us all about you’. If this was true, then some of the crew must have miraculously got out of the aircraft, but Jim was fairly certain they were dead.
The Luftwaffe invited Jim to change sides and fight with Germany against the Russians, as members of the Ukrainian Third Army had done. If Jim would join the British Freikorps, not only would he be freed immediately, he was told, but he would be helping to save Europe from the impending onslaught of communism. Britain and Germany should never have fought, his interrogators continued, as their people were of the same racial stock, but it was not too late for the two nations to join forces against the common enemy from the east. Jim had never heard of the British Freikorps, but it had recruited about thirty Allied POWs, including three Australians and one New Zealander. Jim declined the invitation.
Shortly afterwards, Jim was taken to Nuremberg and Stalag XIIID, where he would remain until the end of March. But before that, there was Dresden.
41
SHROVE TUESDAY
Blue Connelly, a wireless operator with 57 Squadron RAF, had been christened Langton, but his red hair ensured he would never be known as anything but Blue. Born in Bangalow, on the New South Wales north coast, in 1925, Blue had helped his butter-maker father during the Depression before taking a job at the Murwillumbah Post Office, where he learned Morse Code. Called up in 1943, he wanted to be a pilot but when the RAAF heard him bragging that he could tap out twenty-six words a minute in Morse, his fate was sealed. Blue asked why he was to be wireless operator and was told, ‘Son, do you think we’re crazy? You’re already trained, so why would we bother to train somebody else?’
Arriving in England, Blue completed twenty-nine ops with 57 Squadron RAF. The final few months of the war were relatively ‘pleasant’, he recalled later—with one exception. ‘I wasn’t happy about Dresden. That fire, it made me resolve I didn’t want to go to hell when I die. It was bloody awful.’ To be in Dresden on the night of 13 February 1945, was indeed to experience hell on earth.
Over the previous four months, most of Bomber Command’s raids had been against industrial cities and railway hubs. However, during this period, American bombers had carried out sporadic daylight raids on Dresden’s outer industrial areas and marshalling yards, and a few weeks earlier more than 300 civilians died when a residential area was hit.
By December 1944, the bombers had hit eighty per cent of all German cities with prewar populations of more than 100,000. As the year ended, the German Army was retreating on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, but Hitler would not admit defeat. Pressing reasons existed for continuing with bombing in early 1945: the Germans were still hitting London and the prospect of victory, so seemingly close just a few months earlier, had receded sharply after the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s great winter offensive, in December 1944, in which 250,000 German troops caused more American casualties than in any other battle in Western Europe.
Early in 1945, the Allies began considering how they might aid the advancing Soviet Army by strategic bombing of Berlin and several other cities in eastern Germany. In the summer of 1944, the Air Ministry had discussed plans for a major offensive targeting these cities under the code name THUNDERCLAP, but shelved on 16 August. Now it was decided to go ahead with a more limited plan. Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, noted on 26 January 1945 that ‘a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East, but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West’.
On 27 January, Sir Norman Bottomley, Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, issued orders to Sir Arthur Harris to undertake attacks on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz as soon as moon and weather conditions allowed, ‘with the particular object of exploiting the confused conditions which are likely to exist in the above mentioned cities during the successful Russian advance’. On the same day, Winston Churchill pressed the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, saying he had asked the day before ‘whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in east Germany, should not now be considered especially attractive targets. Pray report to me tomorrow what is to be done’. Sinclair replied that ‘available effort should be directed against Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig or against other cities where severe bombing would not only destroy communications vital to the evacuation from the East, but would also hamper the movement of troops from the West’.
In the east, the Soviets were pushing the Germans westward. But the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had concluded that by March 1945 the Germans could reinforce their eastern front with up to forty-two divisions—or half a million men—from other fronts. That conclusion was backed up by ULTRA intelligence, gained from decrypting the Germans’ Enigma code. Hindering the reinforcement could aid the Soviet advance and shorten the war.
The inspiration for attacking Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz thus did not come from Harris but from the Air Ministry and the JIC. Keen to have something to tell the Soviets at the forthcoming Yalta conference with Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt on 4 February 1945, Churchill took a direct hand in the final planning and hurried the idea along. During the conference, the Soviets raised the issue of hampering the reinforcement of German troops from the western front by paralysing the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig with aerial bombardment. But they made no specific mention of Dresden. In response, the British drew up a list of objectives to be discussed with the Soviets, including oil plants, tank and aircraft factories, and the cities of Berlin and Dresden.
As head of Bomber Command, Harris was responsible for carrying out bombing operations but not formulating strategy. However, he and his colleagues questioned and double-checked the decision to attack Dresden, w
hich the Americans were backing. Harris wrote in his autobiography that he knew ‘the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admitted that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself’—a pointed reference to Churchill.
But Harris was not the only one who thought this. Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, Harris’s deputy, who was directly responsible for the planning of the raid and was a supporter of the strategy of area bombing, had serious doubts about the Dresden raid from the beginning: ‘I was not in any way responsible for the decision to make a full-scale air attack on Dresden. Nor was my Commander-in-Chief, Sir Arthur Harris. Our part was to carry out, to the best of our ability, the instructions we received from the Air Ministry. And, in this case, the Air Ministry was merely passing on instructions received from those responsible for the higher direction of the war.’
Although the city had not previously been rated as a major target, the railway marshalling yards had been identified as a possible target three years earlier. An Air Ministry report on 27 February 1942 noted: ‘In view of the exploitation of Czech industry, damage to the railway here would cause considerable confusion to rail transit, apart from the probable destruction of goods being sorted in sidings.’ By early 1945 it had become a target because it was an administration, transportation and communication base for German armies on the southern part of the eastern front. Flying Officer Percy Rodda recalled that ‘According to intelligence reports available in 1945 and which I, as a special duties officer, had access to, Dresden was the centre of the German High Command’s communication base.’
On the surface, Dresden did not seem like a city that should be bombed. Unlike the industrial Ruhr valley, or the coal- and steel-rich Silesia, Dresden had no smokestack factories. Instead, its manufacturers specialised in precision work. In 1944 the German Army High Command’s Weapons Office listed 127 factories in Dresden that were making military equipment. Among these were Zeiss Ikon, Germany’s leading optical goods maker, which made bomb sights, and Radio-Mende, which produced radios, fuses and communications equipment. Other factories made aircraft components, poison gas, anti-aircraft guns and field guns, X-ray apparatus, gears and differentials, and electric gauges. As well, cigarette factories had turned their machinery over to rolling out bullets.