Having waited so long to get started, Dick and his crew proceeded to cram half a tour into just a few weeks, an active player in the shadowy war of measure and counter-measure that was the sub-plot to the Allied bombing campaign of Europe. One of the most significant developments was ‘window’, the dropping of millions of strips of aluminium foil, cut to lengths replicating the wave-length of German radar and showing up on their screens as dozens, sometimes hundreds of aircraft that did not in fact exist. But the Germans learned fast and introduced ways of their own to counter the effects not only of window, but the various other electronic methods used to assist a bomber to its target, and a cat-and-mouse game was played out, ultra-secret, right until the end of the war.
But on the odd trip, Dick’s bomber actually carried bombs. One of the ones he remembers was to Schwandorf, a long flight nearly to the Czech border. Schwandorf was on the verge of being taken by the Russians, who had requested the attack to assist with their advance. Late in the afternoon at North Creake (‘Up the creek’, as they called it), Dick and his crew ate their standard pre-flight meal of bacon and eggs and then went out to the aircraft and waited. And waited. Eventually, they were told to come back and have another meal, after which they returned to the aircraft and waited some more. An impromptu game of cricket then ensued, doubtless played with the pre-flight knot in the stomach that everyone experienced before an op. There was yet another meal of bacon and eggs until taking off just before midnight.
Having long since learned not to question the vagaries of the air force, and happy never to see a plate of bacon and eggs again, Dick climbed into the pitch darkness and for four hours flew solely on instruments, seeing nothing but black. Then the navigator piped up. Dick impersonated the tones of Viv’s Jamaican accent with surprising comic ability.
‘Oo er, Skip, can you, er, see anything?’
Dick glanced out into the impenetrable darkness. ‘Nothing.’
A slight pause, then his navigator said quite matter-of-factly, ‘Thirty seconds to go, port side.’
‘Then,’ said Dick, ‘it was just as if someone had turned a bloody light on.’
The darkness was suddenly split by light, and an entire valley stood illuminated before him as the Pathfinders dropped their brilliant coloured target indicator flares. After four hours flying over a blacked-out Continent, it was some piece of navigation, indicative of the machine into which Bomber Command had evolved by war’s end. Four years earlier, it was estimated that on the night trips into Europe, one bomb in fifty came within 5 miles of the intended target. ‘We were right up at the head of the stream and opened up and bombed immediately.’
Soon after, Viv came into his own again, this time on a flight over the North Sea. With the aircraft heading in the direction of Denmark, Viv called up that he was going down the back for a pee, the Elsan ‘sanitary pan’ being situated right at the rear of the aircraft near the rear-gunner. Dick reckoned he must have found it hard going, clambering over the main wing spa, then in the freezing temperatures fiddling with leads, cords, zips and several layers of uniform and flying suit and he was obviously away from his desk longer than he meant to be. When at last he made it back to his position, he urgently hit the intercom.
‘Oo er, Skip, what course you flying?’
Dick told him the heading he was on, which made his navigator even more anxious. While he’d been attending the call of nature, they had missed a course change and were now heading too far into Denmark. He quickly gave the correct heading and Dick made what he called a ‘split-arse turn’, whipping the aircraft around on its wing. As he did so, a Junkers 88 night fighter which had been hiding right underneath the Halifax shot out from underneath.
‘With the moon in the position it was, we would have been a sitting duck,’ said Dick. It was so close that he actually saw the German pilot and reckons he noticed the shock on his face. With their ‘schrage Musik’ upward-firing 30-millimetre cannons, Dick estimated the German could only have been seconds away from shooting into the engines and fuel tanks of the Halifax. As it was, Dick turned quickly away, and the fighter did not re-appear.
‘I think he may have been tired of the war,’ he reckoned.
If not for their navigator spending a little too long at the loo, they could well have been just one of the hundreds of crews that simply vanished in the night.
It was the closest he came to a night fighter, but not the closest to his demise. Even as late as 1945, an average of eighteen Bomber Command aircraft a month were being lost to collision, and Dick nearly became one of them. With six or seven hundred aircraft passing over a target in the course of about 20 minutes, at night with no navigation lights, the figure is hardly surprising.
On the way home one night from a trip at four in the morning, Dick was feeling tired and irritable, a mood not improved by the fact that he could hear the hissing sound of an open microphone in his headphones. Someone in the crew must have failed to switch theirs off after speaking and the ambient noise was annoying.
‘Check your mikes,’ he announced.
But the noise continued. ‘Come on, check your bloody mikes,’ he implored the crew, but the noise didn’t go away.
He began to feel uneasy and something made him look up. The great black shape of a Lancaster, oblivious to Dick’s Halifax just below was moving over his head barely feet away. The gunners, looking not down but up, had missed it completely. ‘We were virtually at the same height,’ Dick told me. He pushed the stick down to lose height. The hissing noise stopped.
Dick did eighteen trips, then ran out of war. Afterwards, he flew his crew and some of the ground staff over the ruins of the happy valley, so they too could witness the destruction to which they had contributed.
Dick’s was a strange career of stop-start and many unexpected turns but he regretted none of it. He showed me a postwar picture of Viv Cooper, who he kept in touch with for many years after.
‘Viv had five boys and a girl. We had five girls and a boy.’ As Dick reflects, if not for Viv, no-one would have had anyone at all.
14
Derek French
Pilot
I’m part German. I’ve still got some shrapnel in me.
Derek completed his flying training, answered a call to volunteer for the Royal Air Force for a five-year stint and arrived in England nearly two full years before war began. Not that his Australian training cut much ice with the RAF at that early stage. When asked where he had undertaken his initial flight instruction, he answered ‘Point Cook’ and was sent straight back to training.
At least he was able to hang onto his distinctive dark-blue Australian uniform, until such time as it wore out, after which he was expected to buy the sky blue tunic of the RAF. This however, never eventuated. As Derek said, ‘Once war broke out, there was always someone getting bumped off, so we just took his.’
When trained up to their liking, Derek was posted to number 50 Squadron, Royal Air Force Bomber Command, which at that stage operated the Hawker Hind bi-plane – a quaint old kite with strings and open cockpits – looking more a part of the nineteenth century than the twentieth. In 1938, at the height of the Munich Conference, when Britain opted to sell its ally Czechoslovakia down the river rather than stand up to Herr Hitler, Derek and his crew spent a day and a night painting their Hinds in camouflage in expectation of going to war. God help them if they had. In any other context the old Hinds would have been delightful and jaunty in a ‘magnificent men in their flying machines’ kind of way, but at that time they epitomised Britain’s total unpreparedness for war with the rising industrialised monster that was Germany.
At last, however, the British government realised the imperative to re-arm and re-equip, so went about replacing one under-performing, outclassed aeroplane with another, the Handley-Page Hampden. At least the Hampden was fast, because that’s all it had going for it. A twin-engined medium bomber, the expectations it raised were enormous. Sleek-looking, powerful and manoeuvrable with an all-meta
l monoplane construction, twin tail and lovely big bomb-load, it more than looked the part of the new-age bomber that would bring His Majesty’s air force kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Then, sadly, it was flown in combat.
I’ve found it to be a rule of thumb that the more nicknames attributed to an aircraft, the worse it usually is, and the Hampden had more than just about any. Flying suitcase, flying panhandle and tadpole are a few and these tended to flatter it. The design flaws were twofold: firstly, it was woefully under-armed, with nothing but a couple of old hand-operated Great War vintage Vickers guns sticking out the front and back (and these with so many blind spots they were next to useless) and secondly, the fuselage was absurdly narrow – less than a metre at any point – so that you could knock both sides with your elbows. This meant that the pilot was always extremely uncomfortable, couldn’t stand up even for a pee and if wounded, was impossible to remove from his seat. Nor could any of the crew of four reach one another.
The Hampden also had a low ceiling – 15,000 feet – and lacked self-sealing fuel tanks (a rubbery coating which reacted with the leaking petrol to form a rudimentary barrier and plug the holes cause by enemy bullets or shells). This made them burn very easily.
‘We thought we had the best aircraft in the world and that we were so well trained,’ said Derek reflectively.
Sadly, neither turned out to be the case. The Hampdens were put onto the early daylight raids with catastrophic results, then relegated to night bombing. Enter people like Derek.
‘When I started on operations on Hampdens, I’d had as much training for night flying as anyone else on the squadron – 3 hours 50 minutes. That’s barely a circuit.’
Derek’s flying career was so colourful, so varied and took in such a variety of places, I simply could not keep up. My woefully short interview with him thus became a kaleidoscope of places, people and anecdotes. I soon discovered him to be a highly engaging, well-read and sensitive person of great wit and intelligence.
Derek fascinated me primarily because he was the only pilot I met who had operated during the early, primitive stages of the European air campaign between 1939 and 1941. By war’s end, Bomber Command had evolved into a machine of a hideously efficient destruction, with the ability to dispatch a thousand aircraft to obliterate an entire city in a single night, aided by the most sophisticated scientific developments of the day. But its early stages were a very different story. On the first day of the war, President Roosevelt urged the warring and soon-to-be warring nations to agree not to bomb areas where civilians might be harmed. Everyone agreed, even Germany. Besides, British thinking of the time reasoned that attacks on German factories were an assault on private property and therefore forbidden, a view expressed by none other than the Minister for Air, Sir Arthur Kingsley Wood, when it was proposed that the RAF bomb the Krupp armament factories in Essen!
Such absurd niceties were not to last long, of course, and in any case were simply making a virtue out of necessity as the inexperienced British crews of the time were just about incapable of hitting anything anyway. Instead, for the first few months of stand-off during what became known as the ‘Phoney War’, the RAF dropped propaganda leaflets, telling the German people that Hitler was a very nasty man indeed and politely suggesting they all surrender. It had no effect but did gain crews valuable night flying experience over enemy territory.
It all started to change when the Germans bombed ships of the Royal Navy at their home base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. Some of the stray bombs killed one civilian and wounded seven more in a nearby village. Two nights later, on 19 March 1940, Bomber Command ordered a retaliatory attack on a German seaplane base at Hornum on the island of Sylt, near the Danish border. It was the RAF’s largest operation of the war so far: twenty Whitleys and thirty Hampdens attacked a German land target for the first time. Derek French was in one of them.
‘We got back and couldn’t wait to count the bullet holes in our aircraft. There weren’t any,’ he said.
Not a great deal of damage was done to the Germans either, but only one aircraft was lost. A notice came down from headquarters to the effect that ‘the squadron’ had been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross. A quick toss up decided that Flying Officer J.J. Bennett was the most senior officer on the raid and was therefore given the honour of wearing the ribbon on his tunic. A few days later, however, navigation logs revealed that Bennett had been nowhere near Sylt and had in fact bombed Denmark, for which the British government was required to pay substantial compensation. If Derek felt a little put out by this, he didn’t let on. Besides, it was soon his turn to win one all on his own.
A month later on 9 April, Germany struck north into Denmark and Norway. Denmark was gone within hours, but Bomber Command was ordered to try and stem German maritime operations in Norway. Losses were enormous. The aircraft barely had the range to cope with the eight hour, 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometres) round trip across the North Sea and all of them went unescorted by fighters. Added to this, the bizarre restriction on bombing German land targets was still not lifted, so instead of attacking the vital communication centres that were directing the campaign well within range of the RAF in northern Germany, crews were ordered to targets at the limits of their endurance in southern Norway and which were already occupied and well defended.
Derek was given the task of mine laying in Oslo Fjord. Long and narrow, surrounded by mountains and easily defendable, it was highly dangerous, considering the mine had to be dropped at night at a height no greater than 500 feet (150 metres) and a speed not more than 150 miles (240 kilometres) per hour. On this trip, he was led by another Australian, Duncan Good, ‘a magnificent character’, Derek said. Going in ahead of him, Derek watched as Good’s aircraft was picked up by searchlights and anti-aircraft fire, but he continued along the whole length of the fjord and dropped the mine. Derek could see that he was in trouble but he seemed to be occupying the Germans’ attention, giving him an easier run. Both aircraft made it home. Only upon returning to his base at Waddington did Derek realise what Good had been through. He had stopped a shell in the cockpit which had shot out most of his teeth as well as badly damaging both his wrists, his second pilot having to sit on top of him to lay the mine and fly home. Good recovered, picked up a new set of teeth (and a new wife as it happened) and was back again flying with his wrists in plaster, only to be killed later, mine laying again south of Brest.
I had trouble keeping up with Derek. Every moment, he seemed to be telling me a new story from a different part of the war, flying a different aircraft. Suddenly we were in Burma, flying Wellingtons with a ceiling of 10,000 feet, negotiating mountain passes of 9,500 feet. Then we were back in Scotland, being greeted by one Winston Churchill just before his ascension to the prime ministership in May 1940 and who was keen to sit down and talk to Derek about operational flying. I asked him for his strongest memory of the man.
‘He ate peas using his fork like a spoon,’ he told me. ‘I encouraged my kids to do the same.’
Once during the invasion of France and Holland, Derek was sent to bomb Dutch railway yards at Eindhoven. His navigator and second pilot had the night before damaged an aircraft in a bad landing and his nerves were probably more fragile than normal. They couldn’t find the target. Peering into the gloom of a blacked-out Continent, it was all eerily quiet and they were flying low at 1,000 feet (300 metres) to make out the terrain. All he could see was a big river, bigger than anything that should have been where they were supposed to be. Then everything seemed to open up on them, lights, explosions and red hot lines of tracer coming from all directions, whooshing up to meet them and accelerating as they came closer and flew past into the night. One slammed into the fuselage and exploded inside the aircraft. A few days earlier, a slab of armour plating had been installed behind the pilot’s chair. ‘That saved me,’ said Derek.
Shell fragments left him bloodied, but still able to return to base, where he was abused by the CO for flying too
low over enemy territory. As Derek put it, he ‘just faded away’ and collapsed, spending the next seven weeks in hospital. As it turned out, they had mistakenly flown due east of the target and had been the lone attacker of the mightily defended German industrial centre of Dusseldorf. The river they had been following was the Rhine.
On his recovery, and having completed his first of many tours, Derek was given a special all-black Hampden to test the efficacy of the British night fighter tactics and searchlights. ‘None of them could ever catch me,’ he said. Once, he was summoned to fly down to Grantham to report to none other than the commander of number 5 Group (and later the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command itself) Air Vice-Marshal Arthur T. ‘Bomber’ Harris, one of the most controversial figures of the war. Derek had no idea what the big chief could possibly want and felt apprehensive about the whole thing.
As it turned out, Harris simply wanted his opinion of the station commander at Waddington, a man Derek disliked and told him so. Harris obviously admired his candour and asked, ‘So, what are you doing now, and what do you want to do?’ Derek didn’t have to think twice.
‘I’ve heard on the grapevine you’re getting a new type of aeroplane and starting a new squadron. I’d like to be in it.’
Harris picked up the phone. ‘French is joining 207 Squadron tomorrow.’
And it was done. It was the first and last time he met the man.
The ‘new’ aeroplane was the Avro Manchester and it was yet another unmitigated disaster, primarily because of its ridiculous engine, the ominously named Vulture. Today, even the idea seems slightly silly. Rather than have two good engines on each wing, the manufacturers at Avro thought it would be interesting to squash two into one and so came up with the Vulture, in reality two 12-cylinder engines, one atop the other powering a single crankshaft. It gave enormous power to the single propeller, but the concept was in reality beyond the technology of the day and the Vulture was chronically unreliable. They caught fire, the bearings broke, engine oil overheated rendering it useless. The troublesome Vulture became the bane of crews and mechanics alike.
Flak Page 15