Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  Altogether there were seven intelligence officers in the Wing (at twenty, I was by some thirteen years the most junior). Squadron Leader Walkerdene was by a long way the most senior. Now in his late forties, he had flown above the trenches in the First World War. Small, energetic, impetuous and nervy, he was not a deep thinker, but made up in words what he lacked in profundity. He had been appropriately christened (without his knowing) as Squadron Leader Walkie-Talkerdene. His number two was also just over forty. Connie Constant had been in oil between the wars, spoke several European languages and was a thoughtful, sophisticated man. He was much nearer to the intelligence officer of my imagination than Squadron Leader Walkerdene; yet the senior flying officers clearly thought more highly of the squadron leader’s garrulous advice in briefing for raids than the terse comments of Flight Lieutenant Constant.

  Each squadron has its own intelligence officer. With 226 it was a Scots lawyer. Bob Laurie came from Edinburgh and had something of the sententious air that went with that windy city. It did not stop his rough and tough Dominion crews adoring him. The intelligence officer in a squadron had to be a favoured uncle, someone to be trusted to give you true advice in difficult circumstances. It was no good the intelligence officer pretending there was going to be no opposition in a raid which last time had cost us two planes. What you wanted to hear were words of wisdom and advice on how to get out of it alive, making clear in the briefing where the enemy flak was placed and which way to turn off the bombing run in order to avoid it.

  Flight Lieutenant Hovendon had that sort of seamy battered face and heavy moustache you might have encountered on a race course. He would give you an unexpected tip in that gravelly voice that had experienced too many cigars and late nights. Predominantly English, 88 Squadron took to Hovers as a wily bird, as British as Lieutenant Leger was French. It would not have been just to have an English intelligence officer for 342, a totally French squadron. It was hard to pin down what made them as French as they were. It was not simply the language (mostly from the French colonies, they virtually all spoke colloquial English). No, it was something in the way they slung their flak-jackets over the shoulder, a certain panache. Though we all inhabited the same Officers’ Mess, French and British didn’t fraternise all that much.

  Finally, there were the three operations officers, of whom I was the most junior. It was our job to receive the battle orders from 2 Group, and to transmit them to all the appropriate people from the commanding officer to the warrant officer in charge of the riggers. My best friend was Leslie Rates, the senior flying officer operations. In peacetime he was something in the City. About six feet two inches tall with a face that looked carved in granite, he seemed like one of those minor faithful friends that you often encounter in Dickens. It was he who had christened our chief intelligence officer ‘Walkie-Talkerdene’. There was a trace of the cockney in Rates’s appropriately cynical reactions, whereas Flying Officer Robertson-Williams had clearly been to a minor public school. His heavy moustache did not completely conceal some anxious preoccupation. He had been with 137 Wing only a few weeks longer than me, and just before that he had married. He wrote his new wife a long letter every day. ‘’E’s proper lovesick, ’e is,’ said one of our sergeants. That did not explain why, coming into his billet to wake him up when he was late on duty, I saw a heavy automatic under his pillow.

  One of the three of us was always on duty, from 8 a.m. to 8 a.m. the following morning. There was a barnlike Operations Room with a raised dais on one side facing across a big map table to the blackboard on the wall opposite, where there was space to fill in every aircraft and its crew and its present condition, down to the terse ‘missing’, or even more conclusive ‘shot down’ or ‘crashed’. It was the duty of the Operations Sergeant to keep this board up to date under the jurisdiction of the ops officer. Besides him there was a switchboard and a WAAF operator with a direct line to everyone of importance on the airfield.

  Just within the entrance was a small anteroom with a camp bed for the duty officer, a bathroom and shower. Not that there was over-much time for such luxuries. Usually, the day began about 2 a.m. with a telephone call. The time told you it was going to be the group operations officer (who else would ring at such an hour?). The thought of that cleared the voice remarkably:

  ‘Hullo, this is 137 Wing, Pilot Officer Gill.’

  ‘Hullo Mike, Two Group, Edrich here, ready to scramble?’

  ‘Scrambling.’ This was the remarkable device which meant that while the line remained clear for us any snooper would hear only a ululating mush. The fact that we were using the scrambler meant that a number of people had to be informed: the Commanding Officer (Group Captain MacDonald), the Wing Commander Operations (Jack Adams), the Wing Commander Flying (Ian Spencer), the Squadron Leader Navigation (Gerry Baker), the Squadron Leader Intelligence, and so on down to the Met Officer and the Armaments Officer. Everything that could be quantified, the number of bombs to be dropped, the type of bomb, the hour and minute of take-off, the time of arrival over target, the number of aircraft taking part, the fighter cover (if any): all possible information was dictated by Edrich against a standardised form on which I was writing it down. Once the order was completed I had to see that it was carried out, beginning with personally informing the commanding officer. This led me into trouble on my very first lone night of responsibility.

  Group Captain MacDonald was a strikingly handsome man, probably in his late thirties. I could see that he might have quite a temper if roused. He was a career officer, who, I believe, had flown battle bombers (often called ‘flying coffins’) in the Phoney War and the subsequent battle for France. I also understood that it was his squadron that was asked to provide six planes to bomb the bridge at Maastricht on 12 May 1940. The whole squadron volunteered, so the first six on the duty roster were taken. Only one plane came back, but the bridge was partially destroyed. The leading pilot and navigator were posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

  Now, almost exactly four years later, the group captain was awaiting another summons over which he had no control. His wife was expecting their first child. There had been complications and a history of earlier difficulties. Only the previous day the CO had announced to my telephonist that he did not want any duty calls put through to his house.

  In the wee small hours the bell rang. It was Edrich with details of an air strike, which was called for very early in the morning. Even if I left telling the CO until the last possible moment I would still have to call him at 5.30 a.m. What should I do? On my instructions it said quite clearly that the commanding officer was the first person to be informed of any planned bombing raid. Yet only the day before he had said no duty calls to be put through to his house.

  It was a crisis on my very first day in charge. What a stinker! What to do? I rang the Wing Commander Flying. He was the next in the chain of command, another career officer and reassuringly steady. Normally I would not make this call myself, but leave it to my sergeant while I personally dealt with the detailed fusing instructions on the bomb load, but I needed his advice. Considering that I had woken him at 3.30 a.m., Wing Commander Spencer was remarkably unruffled. ‘Crew briefing at six? I’ll be in by five-thirty. Let the old boy have a good night’s rest.’

  At 5 a.m. he was on the phone again. ‘Had a look at the weather? It’s pretty thick down here. Tell you what. I’ll take Samson for a stroll down by the Met Office.’ Samson was his bull terrier.

  I took a look outside. Fog was rolling up from the narrow valleys like dry ice in a theatre production of Macbeth. In the meantime, the 500lb bombs that the battle order demanded were being loaded, eight to each Mitchell. I could hear the clanking of the bomb trolleys going round the dispersal, and the testing of engines like the tuning of a theatre orchestra.

  By 5.30 a.m. the squadron intelligence officers had delivered the battle order of the individual planes and their crews to the Operations Room while, bleary-eyed and tousled, the men themselves were having the o
ps breakfast of orange juice, coffee, bacon and a couple of fried eggs. At 6 a.m. they were crowded into the briefing room. The 226 Squadron commander (Wing Commander Dennis Mitchell) described the target and the plan of attack. The Wing Commander Flying and Squadron Leader Navigation went into landmarks along the route and ‘hot’ areas to be avoided, because they were particularly well protected by enemy ack ack. The Met Officer described the weather potential. There was still an alarming amount of ground mist but the Met man was reassuring (as Met men tend to be).

  Neither I nor my sergeant would be at the briefing. The battle orders transmitted to me by Bill Edrich over the scrambler telephone were being confirmed at this time by a coded repetition sent on ticker tape. We had to check these blocks of four figures against the volumes of decoding instructions which were stored in a safe in the Operations Room. It could be opened only by a combination of numbers known partly by the Duty Operations Officer and partly by his sergeant.

  Officially, everything that I had scribbled down at Edrich’s dictation should have been checked against the decoded tape before the planes took off. It was a devil of a job to carry this out satisfactorily. There were always a dozen unique crises to solve, eating into the time we needed on the coding. By the very definition of the job it could not be delegated to anyone else. Group HQ had the nasty trick of slipping into the coded tape a new instruction or piece of fresh information that had not been available or thought of when Edrich was dictating the battle order, so you could not afford to skip through the decoding. This was, after all, at that moment a linchpin of the war. Any slackness or failure on the part of the Operations Room could lead to the death of comrades, even a shift in the course of battle.

  By 6.15 a.m. the briefing was over. The last observer had pushed his charts and notes into his navigation bag and scuttled through the ground mist after his impatient pilot. The revving of seventy-two engines reached a crescendo. Like impatient war horses, the planes were bouncing and slurping along the dispersal roads and getting into the right order for take-off. Take-off itself was at 6.40 a.m. and was a breathtaking sight. As it got under way there were two aircraft just leaving the ground at the far end of the runway, two more going full belt down the middle of the field and two more just starting off at the near end. All three squadrons – thirty-six aircraft – would be airborne in two-and-a-half minutes. The whole field rang and danced to the thunder of engine power precisely as it reached its apogee.

  Now, I thought, I must tell the commanding officer. I didn’t need to. There was a snarl of brakes outside the Operations Room. The door swung open with a crash. Framed in it was Group Captain MacDonald. He advanced to the edge of the dais, and pitched his voice across the twenty feet that separated us.

  ‘Do you realise that you are responsible for sending thirty-six aircraft on a suicidal mission?’ His voice had the cutting edge of a handsaw. There seemed no adequate reply.

  Fortunately there was a diversion. Samson came in noisily and slumped down on the edge of the dais. Wing Commander Spencer was behind him.

  ‘Ah, Neil, forecast is that this will all burn off in an hour, and then it’s going to be another hot, dry day. I told Gill not to bother you.’

  Another piece of luck for me was that Group Captain and Wing Commander had been friends since school days.

  IV

  For once the Met Officer was right. The ground mist cleared well before the return of our squadrons. It was the harbinger of a splendid month of May. Day after day dawned to brilliant sunshine. The Australian crews played poker dice in the dust of their dispersal area, stripped down to their underpants. They organised shooting contests with our issue .38 revolvers in the scrubland beyond the end of the runway. When going on an operation they would strap the sixshooter to their sides Western style. Hillaby, the laconic Met Officer, complained that it was more dangerous to visit 226 Squadron than to fly a mission over Berlin.

  Not everyone was pleased with the long continued heat wave. ‘We need this weather next month, not now,’ grumbled Gerry Baker to Jack Adams. June was the month when we expected the invasion of Europe to take place. Bad weather was unlikely to hinder the ground fighting, but it could make a vital difference to air support. On the Western Front we knew that our biggest advantage was in the air, while on the Eastern Front it was the almost unlimited manpower of Russia.

  What about the Germans? What were their advantages? Well, now they were fighting for the defence of their homeland – just as we had been four years before in the Battle of Britain. We had no reason to doubt their ruthless and brutal ability in war, and their ingenuity in developing arms that were second to none, like the 88mm gun that could be used against tanks or infantry or elevated into an anti-aircraft weapon. The Tiger Tank was probably better than any we had. Even the Spitfire was surpassed by the Me 109 at certain heights. Then, they were clearly developing something new. All over Western Europe, but particularly facing London and the south coast of Britain, were clusters of concrete platforms, not very large, but heavily defended from aerial attack and enormously reinforced to withstand the largest bombs. We knew all that well, but junior officers like me had not the faintest idea of their purpose.

  The most alarming aspect was the speed with which they were being built. Some intelligence reports suggested they might simply be decoys intended to divert us into wasting time, air crews and bombs on something that was nothing more than what they appeared: a whole lot of concrete boxes. But would they have gone to such immense trouble to make them almost impregnable if there was nothing else? Throughout the month of May they were our chief targets, yet dozens of 1,000lb bombs hardly raised a pimple on their concrete surfaces.

  My first few weeks in 137 Wing seemed like a prelude, a hush before the storm. In the whole of this time we had no aircraft losses. Every day the squadrons would take off, circling above the airfield to gain height, then fifteen minutes across the Channel, five or ten minutes to identify the target, drop the bombs and head for home. Probably there would be a repeat performance in the afternoon. From 10,000 feet, the whole of the Pas de Calais resembled a patient with a bad case of acne. Near the mysterious concrete caves the pock marks were almost continuous. An area as big as Kent looked as though it was being pulverised into a replica of the First World War trenches.

  Just as the early scenes in a Shakespearian tragedy set up the action and introduce the central players, so within five days of my arrival at Hartford Bridge I had been ordered with some other junior Air Force officers to attend the passing-out parade of the Army cadets at Sandhurst. An annual event, this ceremony in spring 1944 could not have had a more appropriate presiding officer. It was Montgomery, whose victories in North Africa and Sicily had probably led to his replacing Rommel in British esteem. As I wrote to my mother: ‘It was a delightful day, the band playing, the large crowd of assorted uniforms, doting parents and pretty girls – the whole thing had more the atmosphere of a garden party.’ Except for Monty. ‘What a rattrap of a man he is! He looks made up of sand and grit. With all the flashing spurs and knee boots, red-tabbed tunics and fancy hats of the various high-ranking and Allied officers around him, he looked almost insignificant, small and slightly stooped in plain battle dress and beret. But one felt looking at his beaky nose and ferrety sharp eyes that he was the keenest person there.’

  It was, of course, as well to think so, as Monty was to be in direct command of the largest invasion force that had ever left our shores. Now that invasion has the inevitability of history, but then there were many hazards. In order to learn more about them I had myself locked in with ‘Overlord’. This was the multi-volume planning document on all aspects of the invasion (code name Overlord). Only the senior wing commanders and the intelligence officers were allowed to peruse these dense, unrewarding pages. They were a big disappointment. I liked the idea of being locked up with a set of volumes as dangerous as a pride of lions. Of course, what Hitler would have wanted to know was where the invading forces were going to land, h
ow many battalions, where were the reserves . . . All these useful facts were heavily disguised behind fancy names and deliberately falsified numbers. It was bad enough working through the numerological code, the correct translation of which was my chief duty in laying out all aspects of our next bombing raid. Of course, I was only an intermediary. It surprised me how much the spearhead of these raids was pointed and carried through at the group level. That was the level of the dynamic Air Vice-Marshal Basil Embry and his advisers, like the Atcherly brothers. Very rarely do I recall our wing commanders of flying and operations sending up a suggested operation. Such suggestions were more likely to come from the Army, wanting, for instance, a German gun battery which was holding up our advance bombed out of the way. This was the correct line of the command, because we were the Second Tactical Air Force, brought into being to be a direct right arm for the Army.

  All that would apply once we were in the fair land of France. Yet, as the fateful month of June unfurled, Gerry Baker’s gloomy prognostications began to come true. It had been so dry and hot that I had been on a low-level flight in a Boston in late May when our principal task had been to plot the position of the numerous forest fires that danced through the greenwood verge of the New Forest. Very fearful these sudden blazes looked when viewed from directly above through the transparent bubble of the navigator’s position. I had already decided that I should try to make my first operational flight the first that the Mitchells of 226 Squadron undertook after the invasion of Europe had begun. I had formed a friendship with a youthful sergeant, pilot George Sims, and his navigating officer, Peter Martin. Peter and I were the two youngest of the eighty or so officers in 137 Wing. George and Peter readily agreed to take me as a supernumerary on this trip whenever it should occur.