‘Freddy, I can’t do anything about it,’ Pat told him. ‘If I’m not careful I could blow the plane up.’
‘I don’t give a stuff if you do blow the plane up,’ was his considered reply. ‘It’s better than freezing to death back here!’
One night they were flying at 14,000 feet over the North Sea on their way to bomb Wilhelmshaven. In the dark, the aircraft ran slap bang into a huge cumulonimbus cloud and became caught in a thermal. Weighed down with 7 tons of bombs, the Lancaster went into a spin. The pilot, desperate to regain control of the aircraft, put his feet up onto the control panel and attempted to pull the control column back, but to no avail.
‘I heard him give the order over the intercom, “Bail out if you want to”, but I thought, what’s the bloody use?’
They had been told that in the freezing water they would be dead in 3 minutes. In that moment, Pat believed, as firmly as anyone can believe, that his number was up. Bugger it, he though, I’ll just go down with the plane.
But up the front, Eric ‘Marty’ Martinberg, the flight engineer, had got behind Les and he too pulled back on the stick for all he was worth. Between four hands and two feet, it was just enough to pull the nose out of the spin and save the aircraft.
‘We were all as happy as buggery in the plane. Chuckling, laughter, all sorts of good humour.’ And there was no fear. ‘While we were in the spin, everyone was quite calm. No-one screamed. No whinging or whimpering. No-one called out, “Save us”. We just shut up and waited for the end. That was the way it happened in those days. You were going, and that was it. It wasn’t like on those American shows.’
I knew what he was referring to, the film Memphis Belle, made in 1990 and starring Matthew Modine and Harry Connick Junior. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s the story of an American Flying Fortress on a daylight trip where just about everything that can go wrong, does. In one sequence, a crashing Messerschmitt 109 slices off the tail section of an adjacent bomber and the wireless operator listens in to the doomed crew screaming their heads off as it begins its long plummet to the ground, a hysterical cacophony of ‘Oh God, I’m gonna die! Save me!’ etc, in typically over-blown Hollywood style. All this is simply laughable to every old bomber crew member I have met who has seen it, and that is most of them (flying films are popular with these blokes). To a man, they tell me that it just wasn’t like that. The discipline acquired over years of training and the duress of operations, as well as the desire to stand by your crew stood firm until the terminal moment.
‘Death was so close to us in those days,’ Pat said without a hint of morbidity. You became familiar with it, and in the end, came to expect it. I told him that I found it a very difficult concept to grasp, and he offered no argument. ‘It was just the sort of thing you had to put up with,’ he said. ‘When we arrived at the station as a crew, we were rated as lasting two weeks. That’s it. Two weeks. We were given crappy aircraft, crappy ground crew . . . and if we’d crashed and died on take-off they just would have taken our names off the chalk board and got in another crew.’ The RAF were tough.
Only once did the fear begin to get at him. It was in a two-week period in the middle of his tour, and reached a stage where he simply didn’t know how he could keep flying. One trip to Dortmund he could only face by taking it stage by stage. He plucked up the courage to go to the briefing, and made it through that. Then out to the aircraft. So far so good. Then came the pre-flight checks and the take-off. At one stage he thought about bailing out over England, but he made it through that too. Then he was over the target with a job to do, and six other people were relying on him. He made it home that trip. It was a turning point – enough for him to regain the strength he needed to keep going.
Other problems included sub-standard equipment and careless ground crews. Once, taking off for Essen, pilot Les Landells found he could barely get enough speed to get off the deck. Just managing to clear the end of the tarmac, the aircraft bounced several times in a field before gradually building up speed and climbing awkwardly into the air. Pat heard the pilot and engineer discuss whether they could make it to the target but did so, and returned without incident. The crew knew their Lancaster was an old aircraft and in peacetime would not be flying at all. The reason they had been relegated what was to all intents and purposes a lemon may have been because Pat’s crew were not popular with the flight commanders, nor the CO himself. Pat was a larrikin from the colonies, Marty was the sole survivor of an earlier crash and had his own particular demons regarding drink and Les, orphaned at four and in the workforce by thirteen, had been well versed in the art of standing up for his rights at Hard Knocks College and had thus made few friends among the powers-that-be.
‘The next time we had to go up in it, we were going to get Les to put it on automatic pilot, bail out over England and let the bloody thing fly to Germany on its own,’ was the general consensus after that incident.
But the explanation for the previous night’s events was not as simple as just a dud plane. As Les discovered, earlier that day the aircraft had been prepared for a target somewhere in eastern Germany, a long trip requiring a smaller bomb load but a large amount of fuel. At some stage, the target had been changed to Essen, a much shorter distance, enabling a heavier bomb load with reduced petrol, and requiring the ground crew to make the necessary adjustment. They only got it half right, loading the extra bombs but neglecting to draw off 500 gallons from the tanks. Severely overloaded, it’s surprising Pat’s Lancaster made it off the ground at all.
And then there were the risks of flying after dark.
‘Night flying was dangerous. You couldn’t see anything.’
Sometimes that was just as well. On a daylight trip over Cologne, Pat was in his position in the perspex astrodome when a Cookie plummeted past the starboard wingtip. The Cookie was often the first one to go, so Pat knew what was about to happen. ‘Hard port!’ he yelled into the intercom, not even having time to look up. The aircraft yawed violently, then straightened. This time Pat looked up to see the entire bomb load from a plane above plummeting towards them.
‘We’re going to get hit!’ was all he could say before instinctively ducking down and, somewhat comically, putting his hands over his head.
Thud, thud, thud reverberated through the aircraft. Like a startled rabbit, Pat emerged from his hole to see petrol pouring from both wings.
‘Prepare to bail out!’ came the order from the pilot.
Three 1,000-pound bombs had hit them through the starboard wing, three through the port, another through the tail section and, according to the mid-upper gunner, a second Cookie had passed through the narrow gap between the wing and the tail elevator. Petrol was also being sucked into the rear-gunner’s compartment, like a station wagon with the tailgate open.
‘With the hot exhaust from the engines, we expected to just blow up at any moment,’ Pat said. The rest of the formation, thinking they were doomed and also expecting an inferno, quickly manoeuvred away, leaving them alone in the sky. On the ground, the Germans also watched the Lancaster streaming fuel and concentrated their fire, hoping for an easy kill.
‘They were spot on our height, but just a fraction of a second out, and it burst just behind us.’
They had lost about 500 gallons, but by some judicious transferring of fuel from one petrol tank to the other, Marty the flight engineer brought them home safely. Some of the bombs had gone straight through the wing, and some were still lodged in it.
The very next trip was yet another apparent attempt by their own side to kill them. Having been relegated to a second dodgy aeroplane, Les saw that the two inner engines were dropping revs and pulled into Dispersal just before take-off. The commanding officer pulled up in his car beneath them.
‘Landells, what’s going on here?’
‘We’ve declared the plane U/S, sir. Two inner engines dropping revs.’
‘Well, start them up, you’re on your way.’ So, half an hour behind everyone else, they took off.
In thick cloud over Germany, Pat thought to himself, What the bloody hell are we doing here? We’ve been hit by bombs on our last trip, sent up on an aircraft that’s ratshit, and now we’re all on our own for the Germans to make us very welcome. So he made a decision – a brave one – and switched on his intercom.
‘Better live cowards than dead heroes,’ he said to the rest of the crew, not really knowing what the response would be. There was a pause and then a cheer went up. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ they responded. The pilot came on. ‘Alright, where do we drop them?’ and someone said, ‘Right here.’ So, somewhere over Germany, it was ‘bombs gone’ and they headed home. But the ordeal was not quite over.
Coming back to land at Wickenby – 2,850 revs, full flap and wheels down, farmland on one side, the Wragby road on the other, 2,000 yards of runway dead ahead – the two dicky engines again decided to drop their revs. The Lancaster came down in an open field, skidding along the ground, cleaning up a concrete drainage channel and sending a fence flying over their heads. But running into a raised road embankment somehow propelled them momentarily into the air, and the pilot managed to find the runway in a sideways manoeuvre Pat could only describe as ‘flying crabwise’. However he did it, he got them back onto the runway. Years later, Les met a woman, who as a five-year-old girl was in a car on that road and was convinced the aircraft was about to hit them.
I was intrigued by the CO who sent them off with a dicky aircraft.
‘Funny thing about him,’ said Pat. Apparently, after sending them off, the officer in question returned to the mess and announced, ‘That crew’s got a one way ticket.’ Is this really believable? I asked Pat to clarify, but he didn’t think it very remarkable. According to Pat’s generous point of view, everyone was under strain and the officer had been new to the squadron and under pressures of his own. As it turned out, the officer met Les Landells, the pilot, after the war and apologised, and they became firm friends. In a sense, this near disaster worked in their favour because they were then issued with an aircraft only three weeks old. But then they nearly lost that one too.
Over Dortmund, they had a ‘hang-up’, a bomb that failed to release. Not just any bomb, but the highly volatile Cookie. Try as Les might to release it over Germany by ‘bouncing’ the aircraft up and down in the sky, it held fast, and there was no choice but to land with it still attached.
As soon as the wheels touched down, they all felt the thud as it finally decided to release – right into the closed bomb bay. Ordered to the end of the runway and to abandon the aircraft, they parked and bolted to a nearby truck to take them out of there. Looking back, they saw the massive bomb had partially forced its way out of the closed bomb bay and was hanging perilously above the tarmac. The ground crew, it transpired, had attached it to a rack clearly marked ‘unserviceable’. Pat just shrugged his shoulders again.
He remembers every trip of his tour: Mannheim, Cologne, Chemnitz, Dessau. But after every one, he would ask himself Why are we surviving? Why us? Hurtling along the runway on take-off, seated under his astrodome, he would say his prayers and wonder, is this the last time I’m going to touch the ground alive? From their respective perspex bubbles a few metres apart, he and the mid-upper gunner would exchange grins and a silent ‘thumbs-up’ as they lifted off into the unknown.
Pat’s encounters with night fighters were limited, but one story stood out. In a rare lapse of memory, he’d forgotten the target, but on the run in, the bomb-aimer, Boris, realised the Germans had set up a dummy target, nothing more than a series of fires lit in the woods outside the town as a decoy.
‘We’ll have to go round again,’ he announced.
They swung to port and into a large cloud, emerging into a clear patch of night sky. Dead in front of them was an unsuspecting twin-engined Heinkel 219 ‘Owl’ – produced only in small numbers but arguably the nastiest German night fighter of the war (on 2–3 November 1944, over Dusseldorf, one downed six bombers in 12 minutes). They could see it clearly in the moonlight. The Lancaster was armed in the nose with two .303 machine guns – described by Pat and others as ‘absolutely useless’ – but here, it would seem was a golden opportunity to turn the tables.
‘Do we have a shot?’ asked Les.
No-one wanted to stir up this particular hornets’ nest and the answer from the crew was unanimous. ‘No, let him go!’ For a bomber, leaving well enough alone was always the more popular option.
In spite of all the odds, Pat, for reasons he has long since given up wondering about, got through, finishing his tour with a couple of ‘Manna’ trips, dropping food to the starving residents of Rotterdam.
‘Much nicer thing to do than dropping bombs and killing people,’ he said.
The only one of his original crew not to finish was Marty, the magnificent flight engineer who saved their bacon on more than one occasion. Having been the sole survivor of a Halifax crash in training, his nerves were already in tatters by the time he started with ops but he pressed on.
‘These days he wouldn’t have flown again, but back then they wanted their money’s worth.’
Finally, his nerve went altogether and he could take no more, and who could blame him? Facing a charge of LMF – Lack of Moral Fibre – he faced a court martial but the squadron engineering officer would hear none of it and Marty was instead re-assigned to a non-combat role flying in the Mediterranean. He just disappeared from the crew one night, and that was that.
After the war, Pat suffered from stress himself enduring rashes, stomach complaints and bad hearing from the hours spent alongside the spinning prop tips. Pat’s affection for his old crew was undiminished, and he was still close to Les, his pilot. He caught up with all of them on a trip to England a few years back. All except Marty, who died some time in the 1980s. It was one of Pat’s few detectable regrets. The attitude to death and the men’s deep loyalty to one another were evident in one last anecdote before I left.
In his hut, which housed roughly eighteen men of different crews according to rank, lived another Australian wireless operator, Ollie Just. Ollie had survived a bail-out over the French coast and had told Pat the remarkable story of his escape. After being given the order to jump from the pilot, Ollie had harnessed up, clambered over the main spar and stood at the open rear doorway. Standing next to the hatch, but making no sign of moving, was the English mid-upper gunner. Ollie couldn’t work out what the man was waiting for and gestured for him to go, but he remained where he was. It was no time for niceties so Ollie jumped and was soon picked up. Both the rear and mid-upper gunners perished in the crash. Pat had thought about this a great deal and reckoned he understood exactly what was going on. For some reason, the rear-gunner in that aircraft couldn’t, or wouldn’t jump and chose to go down with the aircraft, and his mate, whom he’d trained with, simply chose to go with him.
Pat smiles and shrugs his shoulders. ‘That’s just how it was back then.’
16
Brian Walley
Pilot
I signed up at seventeen and put my age up.
What happened afterwards taught me not to
be so impetuous.
Brian joined the RAF on 1 July 1940. Exactly a year later on 1 July 1941 he was handed his pilots wings. There was no ceremony, no passing out parade. He was simply given a list of items to collect from stores with ‘brevet, flying’ appearing slightly above ‘laces, boot’.
In the year since joining up, he had watched the Battle of Britain, been given ten rounds of ammunition to guard an aerodrome in Shropshire against possible German paratroop attack and trained to fly one of the stupidest aeroplanes ever built, the Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley.
It’s hard to find much to say that’s positive about the Whitley. This twin-engined tub was the first of the so-called ‘modern’ British bombers, admittedly a step up from the fabric-covered Heyfords and Hendons (which boasted natty features such as ‘wheel spats’ and ‘dustbin turrets’), but only just. It also earned for itsel
f a number of distinctions, such as the first British all-metal stress-skinned bomber, the first aircraft to bomb Germany as well as Italy and the first to be equipped with a power-operated gun turret. But these accolades are misleading. The Whitley first flew in March 1936 and graduated into immediate obsolescence. It was slow, virtually un-manoeuvrable, pitifully underarmed and handled like a truck. It even looked ridiculous, flying with a heavy ‘nose down’ attitude because of the high angle of the enormous wings which themselves were nearly 300 square feet larger than its far more sensible contemporary, the Vickers Wellington.
‘In the Whitley, if you wanted to turn left, you’d turn the wheel, slowly count one-two-three-four-five, then the wing would start to drop, and gradually it would begin to turn,’ says Brian. Just the thing to outrun a nimble German fighter.
Brian joined 51 Squadron, operating from Dishforth in Yorkshire, a short runway aerodrome right on the A1 Great North Road, which had to be closed to traffic whenever the bombers took off, ‘otherwise we’d have taken off the roofs of the cars with our wheels’. He arrived in the winter of 1941 – indeed, the winter of Bomber Command itself – when barely a crew lasted beyond five trips.
‘There were six of us and we put in a pound each to buy a little Austin 7, on the strength that it would pass down to the last man. My share went very quickly,’ he says.
With the war nearly two years old, it had become obvious to many that the capacity of the British bomber to hit targets inside Germany was severely limited. Just how limited was not appreciated until a civil servant, D.M. Butt, decided to actually examine over a thousand aerial photographs taken of targets after a raid. The resulting ‘Butt Report’ presented in August 1941 exceeded everyone’s worst fears, concluding with the startling statistic that just one third of all bomber crews were dropping their bombs within 5 miles (8 kilometres) of the aiming point. It was the nadir of the wartime fortunes of Bomber Command, and resulted in a significant review of policy.
Flak Page 17