Flak

by Michael Veitch

  On 3 October 1944, Gordon’s target for his first trip was the sea wall on the westernmost point of the island, but even at the astonishingly low altitude of 5,300 feet, he couldn’t see a thing through all the smoke from the bombs of some of the other 252 Lancasters detailed to attack the same target. However, a direct hit was essential to breach the sea wall and flood the German gun batteries, the object of the exercise. The famous 617 ‘Dam Buster’ squadron had eight of their Lancasters circling with special ‘Tallboy’ deep penetration bombs ready to come in if the conventional attack was unsuccessful. Peering through a gap in some of the smoke, Gordon saw the sea wall emerge and gave an impromptu order to the pilot: ‘Turn 30 degrees, Skip.’ Part of the bomb-aimer’s office equipment was the bomb selector panel on his immediate right – sixteen switches enabling him to select which bombs were to be dropped in what order and a primitive 1940s style computer (it was the first time Gordon ever heard the word) to calculate air speed and wind direction and then make the appropriate corrections, all by means of an ingenious mechanism based on gyros and compressed air. One of the switches was ‘salvo’ by which the entire load could be dropped at once, rather than in sequence. Gordon chose this as the most effective way to attack a small target and let them go in one big bang. Meanwhile, at the other end of the aircraft, the rear-gunner was firing his four machine guns at the ground below, emptying his entire stock of 12,000 rounds into anything that moved.

  ‘I claim to have sunk the island,’ he told me sixty years later, and had the evidence to prove it, handing me automatic target shots, souvenired courtesy of a friend in the Intelligence lab on the base. They are square black and white stills taken at the moment of impact, the large format film yielding extraordinary detail. Underneath the image, the Intelligence officer has written time and place, height, squadron, film run number and the individual aircraft which took it. Rocks, broken concrete and the disintegrating sea wall can clearly be seen. The sea rushed in, inundating the German gun positions and allowing amphibious operations to mop up and open the port of Antwerp. The circling Lancasters from 617 took their Tallboys home, possibly a bit miffed. The headlines in the papers the next day said it all: RAF SINKS AN ISLAND.

  A couple of months later, Gordon reckoned he was nearly witness to a historical, indeed mysterious event. On 15 December his Lancaster was one of 138 planes detailed to attack the railway yards in the German city of Siegen. They were recalled due to the bad weather that prevented their escorting fighters from taking off. It was considered too dangerous to land with bombs still onboard, so the standard procedure was to drop them safely in one of two designated jettison areas, one south of the English Channel and another in the North Sea. The 500-pound general purpose bombs splashed down harmlessly without exploding (one of the features of the selector panel being the ability to drop them unarmed) but the 4,000-pound ‘Cookie’ was a different matter. Most Lancasters carried this monstrous and highly sensitive weapon loaded dead centre of the enormous bomb bay. The Cookie blast bomb was simply a huge canister filled with high explosive, like a couple of 45-gallon drums stuck end-to-end and packed with TNT. In fact, there were three sizes, the largest of which weighed a massive 6 tons and took up the entire bomb bay. It was a crude but highly effective weapon, and could not be dropped harmlessly. Even in the sea, the blast rose up 5,000 feet.

  Late that afternoon, the Lancasters were over the jettison zone, releasing their payloads into the sea. As Gordon said, ‘Cookies were going off everywhere’ in great plumes rising out of the Channel. Amidst the chaos, someone in the squadron (Gordon was never quite sure who) reckoned he saw, unbelieveably, a small single engined aircraft flying through the explosions thousands of feet below. This sighting was confirmed by several others back at the base, amazed that anything at all was flying in this designated ‘no-go’ area. Later that evening, the BBC news bulletin reported that band leader Glenn Miller had been reported missing en route to France on his way to begin a series of concerts to entertain the troops. Officially, the fate of Miller’s plane has always remained a mystery.

  Siegen was given a 24-hour reprieve until the next day. This trip saw the most dramatic incident in Gordon’s flying career.

  On the way to the target at 16,000 feet, the pilot of Gordon’s aircraft started behaving strangely. The navigator noticed it first as the aircraft began wandering off course.

  ‘You alright, Skip?’ he called over the intercom, but received no reply. Suspecting he was beginning to black out, the navigator asked Gordon to check the pilot’s oxygen tube in case it had become tangled and cut off the supply. Gordon clambered out of the nose to the cockpit, but found the tube to be operating correctly. Then, at 24,000 feet, the pilot passed out, slumping over the controls. Gordon stood behind his seat and flew the aircraft with one hand, while the navigator, wireless operator and flight engineer tried to pull the man’s dead weight out the seat in a hurry. I myself have inspected the inside of a Lancaster cockpit – roomy it isn’t. At high altitude over occupied Europe lifting an unconscious man out of his seat and onto a small rest stretcher to the rear would have been extremely difficult. Oxygen hoses and intercom leads became twisted and tangled, and as the only crew member with any flying experience, Gordon climbed into the pilot’s seat to keep the thing straight and level. All this would have been tricky enough, except that on this day, their aircraft happened to be leading the entire formation of over one hundred Lancasters, which were now flying in formation directly behind them. They were being led by a bomb-aimer whose only flying experience had been a few hours on a single engine Tiger Moth biplane back at Initial Training School, a task to which he admits to being singularly unsuited and to which the authorities apparently concurred.

  Reaching the target was now out of the question and the most sensible option was to head for home but strict radio silence had to be maintained. The problem was that every time they attempted to turn and break out of formation, the entire force started to turn with them. Gordon told the navigator to fire off red Very flares to signal the other aircraft that something was wrong, and the mid-upper gunner had a go at signalling with an Aldis lamp. All to no avail. Whenever they veered away, the great black fleet of Lancasters followed.

  The consequences of being responsible for an entire force returning to base still with their bombs were apparently too ghastly to contemplate so Gordon needed to think of something. With his right hand he dragged back one of the four throttles and feathered the outer starboard engine, bringing the big propeller to a halt. Finally sensing something was awry with the lead aircraft, the others at last stopped playing Follow the Leader and let them break away and head for home.

  The wireless operator tapped out the signal by morse in plain, uncoded language: Skipper unfit. Returning to base. Two hours later, the Cookie was jettisoned in the North Sea and Gordon who was becoming quite relaxed in his role of impromptu pilot, began warming to the prospect of a landing, but thought he’d give the crew the option to bail out. One by one, they all chose to take their chances and stay put. It was only in the circuit area with the undercarriage lowered that Gordon felt a tap on his shoulder and there was his pilot, suddenly awake and ready to take over, apparently none the worse for wear. Gordon duly vacated the seat, quietly disappointed.

  The pilot spent a fortnight in hospital, the episode put down to ‘operational fatigue’. These days, we’d call it stress. In Bomber Command, an operational tour usually comprised at least thirty trips before an individual could be taken off flying duties. At various stages of the war, the loss rate was so high that the chances of completing that tour were one in three. That is, a one in three chance of survival. How any of them could do it night after night without completely falling to pieces is beyond me.

  After taxying, Gordon and the rest of the crew were met by a welcoming committee, and a fuss was made of the bombaimer whose cool headedness and quick thinking probably saved an aircraft and its crew. But that’s where it ended. The station commander greeted
Gordon with a hearty, ‘Very well done, Dalton. I’ll see you get an award for this.’ It’s been sixty years. He’s still waiting.

  Postscript: Gordon’s pilot, who he described as a ‘quiet Englishman’, spent four years after the war with what was then termed ‘war neurosis’, no doubt endlessly re-living the days and nights of his tour.

  2

  Dick Levy

  Pilot, B-25 Mitchells

  Levy, you’re the worst bloody pupil I’ve ever had.

  Go and kill yourself.

  I met Dick and his wife, Barbara, in the foyer of a theatre in a town in central Victoria. We had been in contact by phone and by chance I was to perform there in a scratched together production about the joys and foibles of contemporary fatherhood. To my surprise (horror really), he expressed interest in coming along to see it so I duly arranged some tickets. What on earth would he make of all this touchy-feely stuff about modern parenthood and the fears that confront men of my generation? ‘Don’t give me this “life is so hard these days” crap,’ I could hear him saying. ‘You think you’ve got it hard? I watched my best friends vapourised over the target!’

  But of course he wasn’t like that at all. In fact, he was utterly charming and found the show highly entertaining, so much so that he invited me to lunch the next day at his house for our interview.

  Our meeting took place on a clear, cool spring afternoon. Books on art and theatre and classical music adorned the walls of the post-war brick house they’d lived in since the late forties. We lunched on a formally set dining table of dark polished wood with a string quartet playing softly on the stereo in the background and several excellent glasses of wine. This did nothing for the quality of my questions, a fact borne out months later when listening back to my voice.

  After completing his training, Dick headed off for overseas in the middle of the night. Sailing down the Brisbane River in 1943, people in the flats and houses along the bank waved towels out the window to say goodbye.

  Two weeks later, they were under the Golden Gate Bridge and for four days, wartime San Francisco opened its doors to these strangers in their odd dark-blue uniforms and even odder accents.

  ‘They’d never even heard of Australia,’ he recounts. ‘They wanted to know how our English was so good!’ (In sixty years, I assured him, little had changed.)

  Thousands of Australian airmen and service personnel made this eye-opening journey across the United States on their way to the European war. They travelled across the continent by train in luxurious Pullman sleeping-cars, being frowned upon by fellow whites for striking up friendly conversations with the black porters.

  Dick boarded the massive liner Queen Elizabeth and, with 17,000 others, sailed off across the Atlantic at 35 knots, too fast for any U-boat and so did without the company of a convoy. They were crammed eight to a cabin which normally held four, and six more piled up in makeshift bunks in the bathroom. Up above, the Americans walked the decks in shifts, waiting for their turn to sleep.

  After months of waiting, clay pigeon shooting on Brighton beach and visits to the English countryside, Dick was finally sent to an Operational Training Unit at the delightfully named Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire to train on Wellingtons. The Vickers Wellington had been the workhorse of Bomber Command for the first couple of years of the war and were still in service in the Mediterranean but by 1944 most examples were well and truly past their prime. Dick remembers everything in them rattling and creaking like an old truck. It was easy to sustain injuries while being jolted around the rough interior so he and his crew took to wearing gloves at all times to stop burring their hands.

  Wellingtons were remarkable for their unique construction. Instead of a nice even skin made up of metal sheets riveted together in sections, the body was built around a peculiar lattice frame of criss-crossing or ‘geodetic’ aluminium, which was wrapped in an outer skin of painted cloth. It made for a light, strong airframe but burned like blazes if in trouble. The rear gunner also had to navigate a hazardous narrow walkway to the tail section which, should he slip off, risked putting his foot through the bottom of the fuselage. As a kid, I thought their long, rather slender wings resembled the old Fokker Friendship turbo prop airliners that TAA used to operate. But there was nothing friendly about the Welling-ton’s early experiences over Europe in daylight without fighter escort. The first versions even lacked proper gun turrets and were slaughtered by the German fighters.

  While at Leighton Buzzard, Dick also experienced the phenomenon of ‘crewing up’, whereby the various pilots, navigators, bomb-aimers and gunners would form into individual fighting units by means of a remarkably democratic, even organic process. Instead of the powers-that-be dictating which pilot would fly with which navigator, gunner, etc, it was left to the trainee crew members to get together in a large hanger and sort it out for themselves. There they would mingle, size each other up from a distance, trying to glean some quality or talent or spark, some indication that this person was a good sort to risk one’s life with. Sixty-five pilots, sixty-five navigators, the same number of wireless operators and about double the number of gunners mingled like shy teenagers at a dance, all hoping not be the last one picked. It was often the pilot who made the first move to a navigator, then the two of them would size up the rest, based entirely on instinct and first impressions. It was an ingenious system: brilliantly simple and circumventing a whole realm of resentment towards senior officers should someone end up in a crew not to their liking. It was also successful. Barely anyone I spoke to complained about the men they ended up completing a tour with. It would seem the cauldron of experience was a highly effective leveller.

  Upon completion of training, Dick and his crew fully expected to be sent to Bomber Command to train up on the Lancaster. One day, however, a call went out for crews to volunteer for what was ominously described as ‘special duties’. ‘Could be interesting,’ said Dick to his new crew. ‘What about it?’ On leave a couple of weeks later, they all received telegrams to report to yet another Operational Training Unit, not in Bomber Command, but as part of the Second Tactical Air Force to train on the twin engined B-25 North American Mitchell medium bomber.

  The Tactical Air Force was about as close as you could get to being a fighter pilot while flying in bombers and was formed out of a need to provide close support to the fighting troops with a mobile air strike force that could operate from temporary airfields close to the front line, a role in which the heavier aircraft had failed spectacularly. On D-Day, the beaches were supposed to have been peppered by the heavies with bomb craters in order to provide the troops with some shelter. They missed, and on some beaches, the casualties were enormous. Later, in Operation Cobra, the breakout from Normandy, American aircraft bombed their own men when hitting the wrong side of a road. The highest ranking American general of the war, a certain Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, was also killed in a similar ‘friendly fire’ incident.

  It was thus decided that the Tactical Air Force was to be used for close and rapid response, constantly on the move to bases just behind the advancing armies and to be called upon at short notice. The catch for the crews was that a tour in the TAF constituted not thirty, but fifty operations. Flying shorter missions, sometimes several in a day was considered less risky. Others might disagree.

  Dick had never even heard of a B-25, but was impressed from the moment he saw one. Compared to the old Wellington, the American-built Mitchell was a thoroughbred. Fast, sleek, easy to handle and with an unusual tricycle undercarriage (a wheel in the nose instead of the tail) it took off and landed at about 130 miles an hour, disconcertingly faster than the old Wellington.

  A few weeks later on a cold night in November 1944, he and his crew of three boarded an aircraft at Blackbush airfield north of London to join number 180 Squadron, Second Tactical Air Force, British Liberation Army at their base at Melsbroek near Brussels. As a squadron emblem, 180 sported a medieval mailed fist, an object as the crews were wont to point out, ‘n
ot much use on the ground and fuck-all use in the air’.

  Almost as soon as they arrived, their names were placed on the battle order for their first operation. The theatre of the briefing provided an apprehensive Dick with his first look at the big target map. To his astonishment, instead of the coloured route markers leading east into Germany, they headed west, to the French port of Dunkirk, still in German hands and isolated six months after D-Day.

  Flying largely over friendly territory was an easy introduction to his tour but the target itself gave Dick his first close-up view of flak. It was not to be his last. From a distance it was unnerving, up close it was terrifying, a dark red flash at the heart of black explosion. You could feel it, hear it, even smell it. A near-miss would pelt the aircraft with white-hot fragments of shrapnel as if from a gigantic shotgun. Anything closer could tear a hole in the wing or fuselage.

  The word ‘Flak’ is an acronym for Fliegerabwehrkanonen or aircraft defence guns and the Germans were masterful in its use. Guns coordinating with radar would predict the course and direction of an individual aircraft and catch it as it flew into a tight box barrage of exploding shells. The pilots in Dick’s squadron never liked flying in the same direction for more than ten seconds but running up to the target when the flak was often heaviest, they weren’t always afforded that luxury.