Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  The timing of the invasion became hourly more difficult to predict. The Prime Minister wrote: ‘June 3 brought little encouragement. A rising westerly wind was whipping up a moderate sea. There was heavy cloud and a towering cloud base. Predictions for June 5 were gloomy.’ After many of the invasion forces had been at sea for hours in horrible conditions they were recalled, but kept on board their cramped, pitching and wallowing landing craft. The invasion was delayed a day.

  At Hartford Bridge we knew something was going wrong and that it was an effect of the weather. On 5 June, the original D-Day, we were confined to the camp. Most of the officers trooped into the camp cinema in the evening. The film, as I recall, was one of those busty Regency romances with Margaret Lockwood, probably The Man in Grey. As the film ended, a scrawled notice was projected requesting all officers to report to the Officers’ Mess. Splashing through the puddles, we wondered what the verdict was. The sky still looked stormy, yet it would be almost impossible to keep the element of surprise going if we had to land our seasick troops back in England . . . The bar was a large Nissen hut, already crowded with most of the French officers, who were apparently unmoved by Margaret Lockwood’s upholstery.

  The CO was in command, looking much more benign than usual. ‘Come on chaps, what will you have? The drinks are on the house tonight. The invasion is tomorrow.’ We all joined in toasting the great adventure. I had a large gin and tonic and thought I was living a piece of history.

  11

  FIRE ON THE RUNWAY

  I

  Later that night I was running, running, running, along a wide flat highway under a sky that was broadening with pre-dawn light. I was going to miss something if I did not run fast enough to catch it up. What could it be? The noise was so deafening it blotted out all thought. It was coming up behind me. That was it – I was running on the runway, the planes were taking off, they were coming up behind me. They were going to obliterate me with that fearsome noise. I sat up in bed. The whole hut rang and trembled with the sound of the engines. They were really taking off into the lightening sky. It was the first operation after D-Day and I was not on it. I scrambled into clothes and flying boots – I had inherited them from someone who had not been wearing them when he went missing – and really ran up the hill to the airfield. It was too late. The sound of the engines faded southwards.

  I sat down heavily on a loading tender. That was strange. I was surrounded by Mitchells in varying stages of repair. For D-Day each squadron was committed to put fifteen planes at readiness instead of the usual twelve. That accounted for the fact that there was hardly a Boston in sight. It was their taking off that had woken me. They had gone to lay smoke in front of the landing beaches. There was no room for any additional passengers in the Boston, so I had not missed being on our first Mitchell operation after invasion.

  I interrogated some of the crews on their return. It must have been a heart-wrenching mission. The Bostons flew just above the water, leaving long streamers of smoke to blind the defenders. In these opening moments of the battle there was little sign of a German response. We lost only one Boston, shot down by mistake by our own battleship, Warspite. The British Navy was notoriously trigger-happy when approached by a plane from an unusual angle.

  We expected that the Mitchells would be in the next wave of attack, bombing the German shore defences and gun emplacements, but the weather proved even worse than the forecast. For four days we were grounded. Four crucial days, while the greatest armada in history was struggling to gain a foothold on the steep tidal beaches, and the Germans were rushing up their reinforcements.

  Compared with the terrible losses of the First World War, the casualties on D-Day were not enormous, but they were not insignificant either. I don’t remember them ever being published. On that first, longest, day, the assault on the beaches saw more than ten-and-a-half thousand casualties. It proved far harder to dislodge the defenders than we had expected. Why should the Germans prove so stubborn, when they were bound to lose anyway? We were expecting to take the local town of Caen on the morning of 7 June. A month later we had still not taken it.

  The infantry would find itself pinned down between the hedges, ditches and narrow fields of Normandy. There was a fatalism often experienced by those battle-hardened troops. Many had been in the Western Desert battles against Rommel. They were not anxious to risk themselves unduly in these last struggles of the war. Later that summer our maid Dorothy told me that her only brother, brought back from Africa to contribute the tough capability of the hardened warrior, was convinced that he would not survive this last ordeal. He didn’t.

  It was quite different for air crews taking part in these short bombing raids aimed at the German defenders. Our crews felt humiliated that they could not contribute more to the battle. In those first days after D-Day they were not able to prove their mettle, pinned down, rendered impotent and unable to operate by mere fog and rain, while the poor bloody infantry was expected to slog away without any assistance from its namby-pamby partner in the air. What was the good of relying on an ally who gave up once there was a change in the weather? It was easy to envisage how the British Tommy and American GI would see it.

  Each day was no better than the last. We would go through all the rigours and tensions of a briefing which would then be cancelled. It gave me an insight into the moody temperament that afflicted most air crew. I felt so jumpy that I wondered whether I should abandon my plan to take an observer’s eye view of the final themes of the war. But on the fourth morning there were some breaks in the cloud.

  The fallibility of the weather was an additional psychological strain for the airmen. Days passed and we had not even been allocated a specific target. Then, on 10 June two events hinted at change. The code breakers had discovered that a Panzer group headquarters had been set up to run the battle of Normandy from an orchard twelve miles south of the main battle area at Caen. At the same time, the weather showed signs of a change, but only in a meagre way. All day we waited for it to get just a little bit brighter.

  ‘We really need it this time,’ said Squadron Leader Walkerdene. I went through the briefing in a terrified dream. ‘Cheer up,’ twinkled the real navigator, Pilot Officer Martin, pinching my knee. ‘It’s well known that intelligence officers always keep out of trouble,’ grinned Sergeant Sims.

  The exhilaration of the mass take-off lifted the spirits. What did I write in my observer’s log book at the time? ‘Immense activity both in air and in Channel. Two large fires on Cherbourg peninsula. Meagre, inaccurate heavy flak from Caen area. Weather: clear patches over France. 9/10 strato-cn. en route.’

  The area round the Mulberry mobile harbours was so densely active that, as Sergeant Sims said, we didn’t need a plane, we could have walked across the Channel on the piled-up shipping. By contrast, the Norman countryside on a midsummer evening seemed far from the turmoil of war. I watched as we put an end to that. On the bombing run the bombs rolled out horizontally like a series of extra-large French loaves. I followed them down through my field-glasses as they straightened into the vertical just before the moment of impact. Dense smoke shot back towards us and was quickly followed by the contributions of the other squadrons. At 12,000 feet we were too distant to see human detail, but that pile of mounting explosive looked conclusive. Indeed, two months later, when the Allies finally fought the seven miles down from Caen, they found the mass graves that replaced their last supper for many of the Panzer group that evening. The general himself and nineteen staff officers were among the German losses.

  I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but I was more interested in discovering what detail the waning sun revealed to us from 12,000 feet. Most elegant of all were the long avenues of poplar trees near a church in the Caen area. These might have been carved by an industrious craftsman in memory of the nineteen staff officers.

  The flight back to base was like the return from some particularly splendid theatre performance which we had all been witnessing. Flight d
iscipline was rigorously maintained – it had to be when all six planes in an individual box were flying wingtip to wingtip, not more than a few feet apart – but this didn’t stop the humming of a familiar song or recounting a well-known tale. Adrenaline carried us along in a glow of self-regard.

  The same mood elevated the debriefing back at the squadron dispersal. We all felt sure we had been on target and had in some way atoned for the wasted days that had perforce preceded them. There was a section in Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War memories that caught this same lyrical self-regard: ‘What I felt was a sort of personal manifesto of being intensely alive – a sense of physical adventure and improvident jubilation . . .’.

  Across the splatter of the champagne corks in the debriefing room Squadron Leader Walkerdene beckoned.

  ‘How was it then?’

  ‘Some marvellous views, especially coming back.’

  ‘I’m glad I was able to get you that trip,’ said the self-regarding squadron leader. He had done nothing to encourage my efforts. Now he was waving a piece of paper at me.

  ‘I’m sorry Gill, they want you at Air Ministry. As from tomorrow. They’re on the track of those concrete platforms. There’s a lot of additional ciphering to be done.’

  Seeing my disappointment he added, ‘You can make a personal appeal. It’s in your rights. I was sure you would want to do that. I’ve fixed you an appointment with Personnel for tomorrow morning.’

  So perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all.

  He was certainly right that the rumours of a new weapon had put the planners at Air Ministry in a jitter. But the thought of spending months, perhaps years, pouring over dreary blocks of codified numbers was beyond bearing. They surely didn’t need me or my friend Frank Watson from the Intelligence course – the brainy boys had already acquired what appeared to be half of All Souls College, Oxford.

  Frank was in the waiting room. I was very pleased to see him. Five or six years older than me, he was infinitely more sophisticated. At my request we went into the interview together. The Personnel Officer was very friendly. He explained that the Air Ministry believed these pilotless planes to be Hitler’s last desperate gamble. They would put as many in the battle as they could. Hence the RAF would want every officer who could fly to counter them . . . Ah, but we were not pilots. That was a point on our side. The Personnel Officer could not envisage what we wanted to do if we didn’t fly. At this point I joined in and explained that I wanted to make a record of the experiences of war.

  ‘How come?’ asked the bewildered Personnel Officer. I wasn’t very good at explaining but, as it happened, I had been on that important raid the evening before, and the leading plane in a box of six Mitchells had to carry an additional navigator . . .

  At this point the Personnel Officer picked up one of his many phones. ‘You better come in Charlie,’ he said in the tone of one who had seen everything. We got our permission to fly in a Mitchell on a bombing raid when it did not interfere with normal duties . . . and when the squadron commander endorsed it.

  II

  My meeting at the Air Ministry occurred on the morning of Monday 12 June 1944. The intelligence offices were crowded with energetic young men, feverishly passing each other short memos on unlikely defence tactics to use against pilotless bombs. That night the first four buzz bombs landed in southern England. In the next three months literally thousands fell on London and the small towns and villages of the south. There was an unlikely rumour that we might be forced to do a deal with the Nazis. Hitler would surely never have abandoned this singularly nasty weapon. Moreover, it glossed over the Nazis’ weakest point – the shortage of manpower. Nor were we likely to start negotiating at this late hour.

  I had discovered that when my day off came round, I could take the local train into London and meet my father for a meal and a movie or a musical show. We would still have time to catch our respective last trains to Canterbury and Hartford Bridge. It was a pleasure for both of us. My father had taken my mother back to Yorkshire. Quite rightly he thought it was putting too much stress on her fragile nerves for her to stay in Bomb Alley. Life in bomb-battered Canterbury cannot have been any fun for him either.

  So, at 11 a.m. on Tuesday 13 June, we met in Piccadilly Circus. Our intention was to stroll past Trafalgar Square, down to the Mall, to Buckingham Palace and so past Hyde Park Corner under the protection of another great war leader, the Duke of Wellington, on to the Hyde Park Hotel for lunch. But things didn’t work out that way.

  We had only just ceased admiring the window-dressing of Fortnum and Mason and its clock chiming the hours, when a sudden absence of sound caused us to lose our breath. It was the chug-a-way chug-alug of Hitler’s new weapon. It caught our attention because it wasn’t like any other sudden silence. This one was literally a messenger of death. When it stopped it meant the engine had cut off and this crude mechanical device was falling – falling for ten seconds on average and then exploding with the fire power of a 500lb bomb. The dive-bombers at Canterbury had screeched to terrorise; the buzz-bomber left it to your imagination.

  What we had not worked out was that at any moment when the chuga-lug was in the air we needed to know what we were going to do if it stopped. Because it did not fly very high – mostly about 2,000 feet – it was unlikely that we should get a siting on it during its rapid fall. In this first experience we followed instinct and fell flat in the gutter. At the explosion, little whorls of dust rose with the debris of the pavement. The bomb had gone off somewhere north of us, in Soho.

  Perversely, we walked down to Jermyn Street, parallel to Piccadilly, but a good deal narrower. We thought we would be safer surrounded by solid early Victorian terraces. We had not got far before the tell-tale chuntering was heard coming up from the river. Now we saw it, our view unobstructed across Green Park, a little spurt of flame coming out of its backside, veering and lurching, presumably to put off the anti-aircraft fire. It looked like a child’s mechanical toy. Just before it got overhead, the engine cut out and it dived out of sight.

  This time we had thought out our response. This part of London had not only imposing flights of entrance steps, but other narrower steps down which the tradesmen would deliver their crates of wine and assorted goodies. Open to the sky, readily accessible, an ideal buffer for everything, but the direct hit.

  Twice more that morning we needed to prepare a defence at short notice. We survived, but the pleasure of the morning constitutional was quite lost. We didn’t try it again.

  III

  Hartford Bridge fell only just within the range of the buzz bomb. I don’t remember any blasts disrupting the endless toil of the fitters and riggers. One of the first things I had to master was the geography of the airfield – no small order as I was told it was the fifth largest in Britain. I needed to be able to get in touch immediately with any section of it, and also to understand the relative responsibilities of armourers and radar observers, and where the emergency field dressing was kept.

  In some ways it was like being the latest arrival at a traditional public school. The air crews steadily played down their responsibilities, but they expected the newcomer to play the game without being taught. Breakfast for officers was in a big tent from 7 to 8 a.m. There was little difference in food and general amenities between the Officers’ Mess and airmen’s canteen. After breakfast everyone who could went up to the airfield. Some toiled up the steep little lanes on ramshackle old bicycles or hitched a trip on a lorry-load of incendiary bombs, or managed to get onto the neat little Jeeps (each squadron had recently been allocated one of these quintessentially Yankee inventions). Rough-riding, versatile, amenable and hard to beat, they must have been one of the most popular personifications of Western ingenuity and the value of Lend Lease.

  However, they were of no use to Pilot Officer A.M. Gill. As the most junior officer on the field, he was the bottom of the list in getting a ride. Even then he would have to have a driver. Pilot Officer Gill might have aspirations to see t
he end of the war from close-up, but he would not be driving to the scene: he couldn’t drive.

  All this sounds a serious disability in getting around a network of Nissen huts, partially disembowelled aeroplanes, stacks of bombs and radio operators trying out their wavelengths. The first thing I noticed was how helpful individuals were. And the second – and perhaps it linked with the first – was how superstitious the air crews were. I suppose this comes out of their inability to control their own destiny. There was also the increasing tension, which went with each further successful completion of a mission. I witnessed this at close quarters when I became friendly with a New Zealand crew. They were only a few months older than me and had that quiet reserve of manner that often seemed to distinguish the people of the far dominion from their brasher neighbours in Australia.

  When I knew the Kiwis, they were already halfway through the fatal forties. At this stage of the war a tour (the allocated number of missions that had to be flown before a crew could be withdrawn for a spell in training) that had begun as thirty-five bombing missions had risen to fifty missions. Superstition made a particular hazard of the last half-dozen missions. In fact, the New Zealanders’ engines had been playing up, something that was most exasperating to pilot and crew. As with all of us, the New Zealanders had been waiting impatiently for the weather to improve. In a few weeks it became patchier, but it was too late for the Kiwis. They did not return from their forty-eighth mission.

  The Mitchells flew wingtip to wingtip and on this particular trip were only briefly under fire on the bombing run itself. The box leader’s navigator tried to keep the planes on course while continually altering height and veering from side to side. He needed to hold the bomber on the straight and narrow when the air was in tumult with the bursting of hostile flak all around. For a few minutes, the other pilots agreed, everything was pretty hot – bursting anti-aircraft shells, planes going in all directions, following the box leader’s evasive rising and falling. Then suddenly they were out of it, out of Jerry’s flak range, bombs dropped and setting course for England.