The ack-ack fire was negligible. Think the Ities [Italians], poor negligible quantities, must have fired their guns by remote control – piece of string tied one end to the trigger and the other leading to the nearest shelter where they were. Few fighters seen. We saw none, but one crew said they saw a biplane – bloody cheeky, attacking a Stirling, I thought. That reminds me, we saw a fighter as we crossed the coast, but I doubt whether it saw us. We lost each other in the cloud. Finally we turned for home. Altered course to miss Turin, but came back more or less on course. Saw the same awful beauty of the Alps – saw, too, the cloud disappear as we left the coast and reappear as we crossed the Alps.
Big wind change coming back across France. Backed down to about 156 degrees. [Wind] lowered in speed from approximately 60 mph at 7000ft going to 18–25 mph coming home at the same height. Hit the coast where we wanted to, and no-one fired at us, though the clouds broke as we came to the coast. Got a pinpoint and set course. Another wind change and Gee refused to work; hit the English coast at the wrong place and had to fly along it. Then we finally did set course on the home leg but we got too far to starboard and had to go to port. Then we hit base head on and all was well. So ended the only trip I did in October.
By then, October 1942, Bomber Command’s boffins were putting the finishing touches to the terrain-scanning H2S. The first H2S units entered operational service at the start of 1943, but within a month the Germans retrieved one of these devices almost undamaged from a bomber shot down near Rotterdam and began developing counter-measures. Since the technology was so far ahead of anything Germany’s engineers were yet working on, however, the Luftwaffe was slow to detect H2S’s Achilles heel: because the revolutionary new device operated like bats by bouncing signals against objects below, these signals could also be turned into a kind of homing beacon in the darkness, helping to lead the night fighters onto them. Once the Luftwaffe grasped this fact, it gained crucial ground in the stealth race.
While the engineers on both sides of the conflict raced to improve their own airmen’s night vision and to throw sand in the eyes of the enemy, pilots like Otto Fries battled the elements night after night. Darkness was the medium through which he and Fred Staffa sought out their quarry. To see and not to be seen required luck as well as skill, and the natural conditions on a given night could determine success or failure. They called the moon ‘the traitor’, because it enabled them to be seen by bomber crews – better pitch blackness in which to creep up on the massive aircraft undetected. But the moon could also charm and mesmerise. Several times Otto witnessed moon rainbows, when the moon shining from behind beamed its light into fine, misty rain ahead, creating a surreal archway of ghostly light that seemed to lure them on. But even the ideal complete darkness was far from a void. High above any cloud, Otto was spellbound by the majesty of the star canopy, which seemed so much wider and more tangible at that altitude – to touch the stars! Sometimes a fine layer of mist hung like a veil between the aircraft and the stars. Otto experienced these moments with ‘an infinite feeling of freedom’.
Ice posed a threat to the bombers, but seldom caused problems for the German night fighters sent up to intercept them, mainly because conditions that produced icing above the continent were usually regarded as unflyable for other reasons anyway. Cold and altitude posed more of a danger to Otto on the four occasions he had to bale out. Beginning his free-fall from as high as 8 kilometres, he knew not to open his parachute until he was below 4 kilometres, from which point he could breathe without oxygen and would have less time exposed to the freezing elements. On each occasion he knew when he had fallen to the survival level: ‘I had a feeling for heights.’
Otto Fries’s airfield at St Trond was the base for 5 Squadron, First Night fighter Group – 5 Staffel, Nachtjagdgeschwadergruppe 1, or 5NJG1. While on readiness there, the crews began every evening with a briefing from the weather forecaster – the ‘weather frog’ or ‘Meteorolügner’ (‘met. liar’), as they referred to him. Sometimes these Luftwaffe crews sat helplessly listening to the RAF bomber stream passing overhead towards a target, while the defenders remained grounded in Belgium because poorer weather over the continent prevented them from taking off. Endgültig Krähe – final crow – meant no flying that night; vorläufig Krähe – provisional crow – meant remain on standby in the readiness room in case the weather cleared enough to take off and intercept the bombers on their path back to Britain. Fasanen – pheasants – meant clear for operations, but that did not necessarily imply ideal flying conditions. Wind often pushed aircraft of both sides off their course, though Otto had great faith in the saucer-sized Knemeier circular slide-rule he carried with him to factor in the wind-effect and adjust course. As long as the cloud level did not drop below 150 metres, visibility was considered adequate for taking off.
The term ‘visibility,’ however, referred only to a lack of atmospheric obstacles. First the pilots had to guide their aircraft through the darkness into that void, aided by sparse runway lights, their instruments – and their training. One green light on the control tower ushered the fighters from the Stellplatz – the parking position on the tarmac apron – to the start of the runway, where twin green lights would signal each to take off. Three green lights, hooded from above and set 50 metres apart, guided the accelerating fighters along to a white light at the 200-metre mark. After a gap of unpunctuated darkness, twin red lights appeared every 50 metres, threaded to the next pair by a row of red lights, until the end of the runway at 1600 metres.
When taking off, Otto accelerated with the joystick pushed forward to keep the Messerschmitt hugging the ground. Then, as he felt the tail rise with his speed at about 140 kilometres per hour, he gradually pulled the joystick back until he ‘hopped’ the plane into the air with a small jerk of this control column. Now the night held him – but not securely. A string of red lights marked an artificial horizon 2.5 kilometres from the end of the runway, another line at 5 kilometres, another at 15 kilometres. During the time it took to close this distance, Otto had to complete an intense routine of checking all his instrumentation – the artificial senses he needed to trust more than his own in the darkness. ‘Taking off at night was a struggle between feeling and reasoning. We always said feelings belonged back here,’ Professor Fries told me, patting his bottom.
Otto knew the danger: he often had the strong feeling the aircraft was banking away; the urge to ‘correct’ the roll was strong, but the instruments said it was flying horizontal, so he resisted the urge. The take-off routine of checking instrumentation and engaging mentally with it proved too much for many less experienced pilots, however, in the intense couple of minutes before the end of the 15-kilometre guided section tipped them into the blackness. Many lacked the practice of multiple take-offs needed to make the procedures seem second nature, and had not benefited from the rigorous training for instruments-only flying that early recruits like Otto had received. The newer men often allowed their own senses to override what their instruments were telling them and ploughed into the ground. Flying accidents took an increasingly heavy toll.
Taking off was perilous enough, but landing again in the darkness presented far greater risks. If the weather closed in while the crews were aloft, their options for getting back on the ground again diminished. On one occasion Otto brought his aircraft down safely when the clouds hung only 80 metres off the ground – low enough to shroud the 93-metre Statue of Liberty’s torch and not far above the crown of the 63-metre Auckland Harbour Bridge. Short on fuel or with engine problems or damage inflicted by a bomber’s defending gunners, night fighters were frequently forced to put down when and where they could. Others unable to find their own base or land there owing to bad visibility often located an airfield away from the densest cloud and stayed there for the night, returning to home base in daylight. They located these alternative airfields either from distinctive light patterns on the ground or via radio beacons – Funkfeuer – that ‘fired’ a tone signal audible to aircraft
when they were circling a given location and thereby enabled them to be guided in by a radio operator from the ground, to reduce the risk of collisions. Otto landed often with this help and without complications. By then, his eyes were often streaming from the cold air leaking in from breaks in the cabin seal, so that he suffered almost constant eye infections.
Once an airstrip had been located, further signals aided the approach to the runway from 30 kilometres out: a Morse dash or dot sounding either side of a central radio corridor beamed into the air on the approach, then with further signals at 5 kilometres and 2.5 kilometres from the start of the runway. If visibility was clear, Otto and other pilots landing at St Trond could see the elliptical shape of the airfield perimeter from low altitude 10 kilometres away, marked by evenly spaced triangles of hooded red lights and, at the end of the runway, two landing beams angled to direct approaching aircraft down the throat of the landing corridor.
The one advantage night fighter pilots had when landing in the darkness was that their instrument lighting was easier to read. But even this was fraught with uncertainty, as Otto experienced once when he tried to land in impenetrable fog. First the radar failed, then the radio and finally his instruments. He managed to find his airfield and get the aircraft down safely. He and Fred walked away unhurt, but this was just the lucky, improbable ending to a nerve-wracking sequence of events, described in a later chapter, that several times could have killed them that night.
CHAPTER 7
FIRESTORM
I saw Cologne in flood in January 1995, when the Rhine had burst its banks from Switzerland to the Dutch coast. My view from the tower of the Kölner Dom – Cologne Cathedral – had been onto an expanse of water more like a massive delta than a busy thoroughfare through one of Germany’s most densely built-up cities. But the menace of such devastation was its silence, and I could not help measuring it against a far more terrifying scene half a century before when, on a moonlit night, Col looked down on Cologne over a bomb-sight as the city was engulfed in flames. By 1945 the magisterial Dom stood almost alone – damaged but not structurally – amid a wasteland of rubble. An estimated 1.5 million bombs fell within the city limits during 262 air raids in the course of the war, all but erasing a settlement as old as Christianity.[1]
Col was on his second operation to Cologne when he took off at five minutes after midnight on the morning of Sunday 31 May 1942, as part of the biggest air armada yet assembled – the thousand-bomber force. This was to demonstrate a new doctrine of aerial warfare, the brainchild of the Bomber Command chief, Arthur Harris. He called it area bombing, but it has since become known as carpet bombing. In a letter written two weeks later to his sister, Gwen Restall, Col described the scene from above that night. (see Figures 7.1-7.17 at chapter’s end)
I was in the Rostock and the Cologne raids and it was a thrill. I find it hard to put on paper exactly how much of a thrill the Cologne raid was. We all knew something was in the wind. First it was a full moon. Second, the weather was good, and third, and most of all, there was a general air of expectancy. Then came the day. We all knew that an extra effort was afoot, because so many machines were being prepared – but we did not know the full scope until briefing time came.
So many crews were going over that it was a hell of a job to get them all into the briefing room. Added to that it was as hot as a boiler room, and I could feel the perspiration trickling down my nose. Everyone was the same, and the room was absolutely packed. The atmosphere was tense as the Wing Commander read out the details. There was a whole lot of detailed instructions from Bomber Command; but we were interested in our own share. We wanted to know what time we were to be on the target, and how long we were to be there and all the rest of it. Then the Wing Co. read out the total number of kites going. Boy, o Boy! It was the day we had all been waiting for ever since the people of London had to take it and do nothing back. There were over 1000. It was a masterpiece of organisation and, God knows, I’ve moaned about the mess the RAF seem to make of things in little issues. Machines were going from all over the place, and all sorts of machines.
When the briefing was over, all the crews going ran out of the room, singing and dancing. As we observers got our maps ready we were all smiles. Then when the time came to get changed and get into the buses to take us to the aircraft, everyone was singing. The fellows just yelled as they went from the crew-room out to the aircraft. Long before we were due to take off, machines passed over, waves of them, until the sky was filled with thunder. Then the turn of our station came, and away we went. Actually, our crew was among the last to take off, so many hundreds were before us. We could see the target from miles away. We just flew towards it, and then circled waiting for a chance to make our bombing run. We got over the target area, I went down to the bomb aimer’s position – the observer always does that at that time – and I had a good look at what was happening below. There were machines everywhere. There must have been German night fighters among this milling crowd; but personally, I saw only British [bombers]. They whipped across in front of us. They nipped from in front and roared away towards the stern. They crossed and re-crossed. Some were some thousands of feet lower. Some were only a few hundred feet. That was what it looked like underneath. The others who could see above tell me it was just like that from where they were. They actually saw three Wellingtons flying wing-tip to wing-tip over the target to drop their bombs.
Eventually we dropped ours, and then got away to have a look. There were literally acres of flames. I don’t mean patches of flame and patches with no flame. I just mean that there were acres of a seething mass of fire. I have never seen anything like it – perhaps never will again. The Rhine flows through the city and there is one famous street which has the Rhine as diameter for its semicircular shape. It is known as the Hohenzollern Boulevard [Hohenzollernring]. It is prominent on any large scale map of Cologne. I could see it – stark black against the orange red of the sea of fire which billowed on either side of it. The moon and the fires were both reflected in the river. Later on I suppose the fires would have been partially shrouded in the smoke; but when we were there, the smoke was not important. It was impossible to photograph the result for some days on account of the smoke. Well, they say that on that one night, we did more damage to Cologne than was done during the whole bombing of London. I can believe it, even though I have seen London. The city must have been a holocaust. It must have been gutted. I think it may be said that we taught the Nazis a lesson that night.
Rostock [on 23 April, three weeks later] was a smaller Cologne. We laid it to waste under the same perfect conditions for bombing. There was a full moon, so that from the coast on the west side of Germany where it merges with Denmark, we simply map-read our way down to the target. It was actually possible to follow the courses of the rivers from Baltic to North Seas. They were just silver ribbons against a black background.
The residents, military and civil defence forces of Cologne had endured more than 100 raids by 30 May 1942 and were to suffer many more before American troops moved into the shattered wasteland in March 1945. Operation Millennium, against Cologne, was the first of a series of thousand-bomber raids Harris unleashed on major German cities over the ensuing three years. It gave an horrific new dimension to people’s power to destroy each other – not only in Germany, but also in Japan. Whether this tactic of pounding the enemy into submission succeeded is still debated. It had the opposite effect in Britain. Although the destruction and loss of life during the Blitz of 1940 was on an unprecedented scale, the psychology of terrorising the civilian population was the same. But, just as in Britain, the bombing of Germany failed to break the civilian population’s capacity to endure, and the destruction was readily twisted by Nazi propagandists into another reason to fight on. But unlike the British, the Germans had a more immediate terror to contend with: that of retribution from the Gestapo, the secret police, for any murmurings – let alone opposition – that could be seen as ‘defeatist’.
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nbsp; Beyond debate is the scale of suffering as Cologne emerged from its sleepless night on the morning of Sunday 31 May. The official record shows that 469 people died, 5027 were injured and more than 45,000 were bombed out of their homes. Bombing of some of Cologne’s major industrial districts on the east bank of the Rhine was light compared with the concentration on the residential and municipal areas on the west bank. Thirteen thousand homes were completely destroyed; 36 factories were annihilated and a further 70 severely damaged.[2] Public transport was disabled for a week, and extensive damage to electricity, gas supply and water mains also hampered the return to ‘normality’ for the already bomb-weary city.
The death toll was a new record for an RAF raid, the first to approach the 550 estimated killed in the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Many aircrew, including Col, saw Coventry’s suffering as justification for the retribution Bomber Command was now meting out, but the destruction of the English city paled in comparison with the later losses suffered by Hamburg in July 1943 (40,000 dead) and, in February 1945, by Dresden (at least 40,000) and Pforzheim (between 17,000 and 21,000). In a US attack on Tokyo in March 1945 firestorms killed at least 100,000.
Harris and Churchill regarded Operation Millennium as a tremendous success. It had dealt the target a blow on a scale not previously imagined and signalled to the Germans a new capacity to take the war to their homes. Leaflets dropped on Cologne soon after the raid promised as much, in a message signed off by Winston Churchill: ‘This proof of the growing strength of British air power is also the Sturmzeichen – storm warning – for what is to come from now on in one German city after another. The RAF offensive in its new form has begun.’[3]
Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany Page 8