Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany

by Stephen Harris

  Dropping leaflets like this was a common means of adding insult to injury. As a newspaperman, Col must have chuckled at the irony that his first two trips were ‘paper runs’ rather than bombing operations. The son of one of Col’s gunners on those trips had copies of the original leaflets, kept by his father, and he sent me these in 2008. The first, dropped over the north German port of Emden on 14 January 1942, reminded the recipients of Hitler’s promise that 1941 would be the year of final victory – ‘an embarrassing promise!’ – and quoted a string of statements by the German high command claiming the imminent collapse of Soviet forces. The second, dropped over Bremen and Cuxhaven three days later, featured a road strewn with destroyed Wehrmacht equipment – ‘the retreat from Moscow’ – and questioned the veracity of the comparatively low loss figures on the eastern front cited by Hitler.

  If such leaflets could forecast doom, Harris and Churchill were busy trying to make it happen. After Millennium they aimed to repeat a feat of destruction on a similar scale every full moon, giving rise to the term ‘bomber’s moon’, though that policy was later reversed because of high losses of bombers more easily found and picked off in full moonlight. Harris made good on this promise just two nights after the massive Cologne raid, sending 956 bombers to Essen. Then, on 25 June, he dispatched 1067 aircraft to Bremen. Neither raid caused anywhere near the intended damage. Col served as navigator and bomb aimer on both of these follow-up raids, flying in ‘E’ Edward and again with Watt as pilot and with Shoreman as the wireless operator – two of the same crew who searched for Col when he ditched in the Channel a week after the Cologne raid.

  Total bomber losses for these first three thousand-bomber raids amounted to 129 aircraft – or 4.25 per cent of all those dispatched. These losses, unsustainable on bare numbers alone over the longer term, appear even more so considering they were disproportionately high among trainee crews, scraped together to make up the numbers. To achieve his show of strength, Harris was eating into his seed corn as well as testing the endurance of his more experienced crews. As the Luftwaffe did the same in the desperate attempt to counter the growing strength of Bomber Command, the air war over Germany took on some characteristics of the war of attrition on the Western Front during the First World War, when tens of thousands of troops were sacrificed, often for minimal gains, in the belief the other side would run out of men first.

  Many air raids shared another feature with this trench stalemate: the bombing was often no more successful in destroying the enemy than ‘going over the top’ had been on the Western Front. Col’s diary records that once he thought he had hit a target square on as bomb aimer; another time the force he was flying with entirely missed the city it had been sent to bomb, and instead caused widespread death and destruction to a neighbouring town of no military importance.

  The bombing run Col counted as a bull’s-eye was over Paris, his 13th op, just two nights before the Millennium attack on Cologne. His diary and logbook record that Watt cleared the runway at Lakenheath in their Stirling at one minute to midnight on Thursday 28 May 1942.

  Will never forget Paris. Bombed the Gennevilliers [Gnome and Rhone aero engine] works on the south bank of the Seine. Two crews from the squadron went out, ours and Bill Barnes’. We got there flying at 6000ft and the first thing we saw was an unmistakable pinpoint [landmark] just above the target.

  We turned on our bombing run, but cloud intervened. As we had been told emphatically that we were not to bomb unless we were quite certain of the target, we made another run. Cloud again. We made five runs altogether, with the same result, so finally we decided to go below the cloud. We got down to 2900ft and there, right ahead, was the pinpoint. Beyond that were the two bridges across the Seine which were shown on the map. What a thrill! I told the skipper to keep on and not to mind the flak (which was surprisingly heavy) because we might not get another run like it. He put her into a shallow dive, and held dead on. I saw the target come up, nearer and nearer and when it was dead in line I let them go. It is the one time I have actually seen them hit a specific building on a target, but by God! I saw them and so did the rear gunner, F/Lt Morrison DFC, and I was so bloody excited that I yelled down the intercom. (Map 2)

  Map 2: Col Jones’s targets in Europe

  We started the shallow dive at 2900ft so I suppose we would have bombed at 2600ft. It occurred to me afterwards that the safety height for those bombs is 3000ft. However, we were going like the clobbers of hell, so we were away before the blast got to us. Jack Ekelund as 2nd dicky [pilot].

  Despite the crew’s apparent care to pinpoint the target, and Col’s belief he had hit it fair and square, later photos showed little damage to the factory. The bombs from the 77 aircraft taking part seem to have fallen mainly on French houses and caused about 200 civilian casualties, including 34 dead.[4] Harris’s introduction of area bombing, using massive waves of bombers, was itself recognition of the inaccuracy of night-time bombing. A report in August 1941 assessed the strike rate of bombers by analysing some 4000 aerial photographs taken after more than 100 night raids. It found that at best only one bomb in six fell within a 16-kilometre-wide circle centred on the target.[5] In other words, accuracy improved as the war progressed, but right to the end bombing remained a bludgeon rather than a rapier.

  Col was open in his diary about one time he simply missed. This was on his 26th operation, late in his first tour, by which time he was already one of the RAF’s more experienced bomb aimers. By August he was flying only the occasional op with Watt and had become a regular with the crew of a Canadian pilot, Flight Lieutenant Al Greenslade. They took off at 11.30p.m. on Tuesday 1 September 1942.

  Went to Saarbrücken – quiet trip, though we were plotted [by searchlights] most of the way back home. Nothing happened and hardly a shot was fired at us. Pranged target good and proper and all the crews came back with a great story of a target well and truly blitzed. Then Command told us that we had pranged the wrong place. Bit of a blow, especially as I said I had seen the marshalling yards – the distinctive loop in the river.

  More than 200 bombers unleashed their misguided fury on the small, non-industrial town of Saarlouis, killing 52 civilians, while not so much as a damp squib fell on Saarbrücken itself.

  The prospects of bombers hitting the intended target improved in later years as navigation equipment became more reliable and the RAF established the élite, target-marking Pathfinder Force, which Col joined in early 1944. Even so, bombing remained imprecise. Dr Laurenz Demps, a Berlin history professor who, when I met him, was researching the capital’s experiences during the war, told me the German defenders knew that around a third of bombers attacking Berlin deliberately dropped their bombs short of the target as they approached over the outer suburbs. He said many bombs missed for other reasons, even when released at the right point over the target: the ‘smaller’ bombs – those 500 pounds and lighter – that accounted for much of a standard bomb-load until 1944 were susceptible to thermal updrafts, such as those created by industrial activity. As a result, many bombs veered off as they fell towards factory roofs and struck surrounding residential areas instead.

  Demps experienced at first hand what it was like being in a residential area of Berlin once the bombs started to fall. He was five, his brother six and their mother raced to get them to safety as the heavy drone of enemy engines grew louder. Frau Demps was intent on reaching the air-raid shelter underneath the large flak tower in the eastern suburb of Friedrichshain. This and a command tower nearby made up one of three major flak emplacements in Berlin: there was another north of the city centre at Humboldthain and a third by the zoo beside Tiergarten Park, just west of the city centre. Each 40-metre tower had a platform on top with an octagonal, concrete turret on each corner sprouting twin 128-millimetre antiaircraft guns, and with a cluster of rapid-fire 20- and 37-millimetre cannons on a skirting platform running around the building below these turrets. Underneath were the bunkers: steel-reinforced concrete up to 2.5 metres thick
that could withstand even a direct hit, as was proven only once at Friedrichshain. The emplacement survived the Allied bombing and Red Army shelling, but shortly after the Russians took it over a suspicious fire destroyed an extensive collection of priceless artworks that had been transferred to the nearby command tower from Berlin museums early in the war for safe keeping. The flak tower itself proved too tough to demolish completely, and today its remnants poke through the earth heaped over it to form a landscaped and tree-shaded mound at the centre of the park. Like Devil’s Hill near my home, this rare piece of high ground in Berlin is built on the bones of the city’s misery.

  The Friedrichshain bunker was a 20-minute dash away for Frau Demps and her two little boys. With a sense of deliverance Frau Demps reached the bunker entrance before the bombs started to fall. But the shelter, built to hold 20,000 people, was full; the warden turned the three Demps away.[6] Back Frau Demps fled, the little boys numb-kneed and scrambling, knowing only their own vulnerability and their mother’s panicked will to save them. The gauntlet-run passed between a gasworks on one side of the road and the unbroken façade of apartment blocks on the other. The bombs were now falling all around. By a miracle, they made it back to their home unscathed. The Demps boys saw immediately that in the desperate, short hour between when they had left their home and when they returned, their mother’s hair had turned white.

  The Demps’ experience, during the failed campaign of winter 1943– 4 to reduce Berlin to rubble, was already common to many people living in German cities further west. What happened to Hamburg in July 1943 made the May 1942 attack on Cologne seem like a curtain-raiser. Col had completed his tour in 1942, but flew as a bomb aimer the following July on the first raid of the campaign against Hamburg, codenamed Operation Gomorrah. His letters are silent on the raid – he had decided not to tell his family he was doing his best to get back on operations. His logbook, however, shows he took off at 10.30p.m. on 24 July 1943, in a 115 Squadron Lancaster piloted by a Canadian, Squadron Leader Ian Bazalgette. It must have been an eventful trip, as Col received a Mention in Dispatches for bravery as a result.[7] Unusually, Col made a descriptive entry in his own log: ‘First 8000 lb bomb – wizard!’[8]

  Like so many of the war’s most terrible weapons – the atomic bombs ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ dropped on Japan being the most obvious examples – the 8000-pound (4-tonne) bomb had a benign nickname: ‘Plumduff’. The more standard 4000-pound bomb went by the name ‘Cookie’ and it had a variety of different fillings. In some attacks, such as that on Bremen on 13–14 September 1942, these bomb casings contained an incendiary cocktail of benzol, rubber and phosphorus, which exploded in a vivid pink flash and earned this version of the bomb the name ‘Pink Pansy’. The 8000-pound bomb dropped by Col on Hamburg contained mainly an ammonium nitrate explosive called Amatex. It was a blast bomb, designed to blow the roofs off buildings and collapse their walls so that the incendiaries showered over the target could feed on the flammable materials inside.

  Though Hamburg, Germany’s second city, had already endured 99 raids by late July 1943 and was among Germany’s most heavily defended cities, the raid of 24–25 July, and the three that followed during Operation Gomorrah, were to redefine ‘total war’ in a way the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Josef Goebbels, had surely not imagined earlier that year. In a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast in February 1943, in the wake of the catastrophic German defeat on the eastern front at Stalingrad, he had whipped the audience into a frenzy with the words: ‘The English say the German people have lost their faith in victory ... that they have become war-weary ... that they don’t want total war, but rather capitulation. I ask you: do you want total war – if necessary more complete and more radical than we can scarcely imagine today? ... Now, Volk arise, and storm break loose!’[9]

  Gomorrah was no exaggeration as a description of what befell Hamburg in July 1943. Col had been in the first raid, on 24–25 July, but was not flying on the second raid of the series three nights later, when another force of nearly 800 bombers returned. A rare combination of high temperatures, low humidity and the tinder-dry conditions following a prolonged rain-free spell contributed to the infamous firestorm. The horror left an estimated 40,000 dead, three-quarters of them from asphyxiation. It drove 1.2 million survivors from the city.[10] In 2008 I visited Ohlsdorf Cemetery, in the north of Hamburg, to see the cruciform mass grave of nearly 37,000 victims of the firestorm whose remains could not be identified. Where the two axes of the long, grass burial plots cross is a cenotaph containing a stone sculpture of death’s boatman of Greek mythology, Charon, ferrying a clutch of tortured souls across the River Styx to the afterlife. Amid the roses along the edge of each grass strip some families have erected small crosses or plaques to relatives who disappeared that night. Some list up to a dozen names, their birthdates counting down the generations from grandparents to infants, most ending with the same surname and all recorded as dying on that same night in late July 1943. Just across the roadway in this huge cemetery is the Commonwealth War Cemetery containing, among others, 169 of the 554 RAF airmen killed during the bombing of Hamburg.

  And what of Operation Gomorrah’s Old Testament connotation of a city eradicated for its sins? East Germany’s most famous artist dissident, singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, survived the firestorm as a six-year-old, later describing it as the night his ‘life’s clock stood still’. He told an interviewer how his mother had welcomed the bombing – even though she lay in its path – just as prisoners in Auschwitz, where Biermann’s father had been murdered that year, prayed for the Allies to bomb the extermination camps out of existence, even if they died in the process. ‘Not only my father, but our entire Jewish family had been murdered there. The Allied bombers were our friends, as a child would put it: our Verbündeten – our allies – who should free us from the Nazis.’

  By some miracle, Biermann and his mother escaped from the Hammerbrook district at the heart of the fire, which suffocated all those trapped there who did not perish in the flames. Amid the consuming carnage, the small boy observed such terrors as phosphorus dropped by bombers and burning on victims unable to douse it by jumping in the canals. Another searing image was boiling, viscous asphalt that trapped those who tried to flee across it. More than one in three residents of this area died that night, most of them women, children or men either too old or infirm to serve in the armed forces – or the terribly brave men tasked with the impossible job of quelling the flames and helping civilians to safety.

  Biermann realised one irony only later: the city park where they found safety was the same from which his grandparents and several other members of his Jewish family had been deported to the death camps earlier that same year. ‘The only accusation I – and not only I – really level at these Allied bombers is that they could have kept aside a few small bombs to destroy the gas chambers in which my father died. And to smash the rail tracks, and the bridges over which the death trains carried millions of people to the death factories. In a humanitarian sense, the bombs could have been put to better use there than against Dresden. That much is clear.’[11]

  One of Col’s letters, written in December 1942, shows he knew of the Holocaust at least seven months before he took off on that Gomorrah raid, but there is no indication he thought he was ‘saving’ German Jews by bombing their cities, nor that he ever considered the merits of targeting the infrastructure of extermination. That 1942 letter indicates he was spurred along partly by his growing awareness of the atrocities Germany was committing to its east, particularly against the Jews, but others show his justification for seeking vengeance was the bombing of English cities and of Warsaw and Rotterdam. He was clearly keen to get ‘back on the job’ when wrote to his sister on 17 March 1943, four months before Gomorrah:

  I can hear the planes go overhead as the lads do their night flying. I’m stuck on the ground. I’d rather fly. Well, at long last we have made one great, big, hell of a mess of Essen. Goodness knows we have been trying
for a long time, and now we have done it. I went to that nasty spot five times, and saw it only twice. There is a great deal of haze there. Still, they have had it at last. It is no secret that Germany is going to feel a terrific onslaught by air this summer. What has happened to Essen is going to happen to many other cities. This summer is the beginning of the end – and also the end of the beginning. I would not like to be a German. I wonder when we are going to begin the second front. Soon, I hope, the sooner the better. Then we can turn our undivided attention to the merry little Japs. I still hope to fly over Tokyo and shovel out the odd incendiary. Tokyo will burn, and in it will be the ruins of the Japanese Empire. (Figure 7.1-Figure 7.17)

  Figure 7.1: Flight Lieutenant Col Jones DFC, 35, shortly before his death in February 1944. (Collection Col Jones)

  Figure 7.2: Emma Jones with her children in the late 1920s: Col, aged about 20, younger sister Gwen (left) and older sister Lass. (Collection J. Harris)

  Figure 7.3: Col at work at the Auckland Star in the early 1930s. (Collection Col Jones)

  Figure 7.4: Col Jones, 24, graduates Bachelor of Arts in 1932. (Collection Col Jones)

  Figure 7.5: RNZAF trainees at Levin, September 1940. Col Jones is standing at far right, Barry Martin seated in the middle row, 3rd from right. (Collection Col Jones)

  Figure 7.6: Two of Col Jones’s earliest Stirlings: ‘T’ Tommy in background and ‘N’ Nuts being ‘bombed up’, Mildenhall, March 1942. (Collection Gordon Galloway)

  Figure 7.7: Col and his crew board a launch after being rescued from the English Channel, 6 June 1942 (Collection Col Jones)

  Figure 7.8: Spamming Adolf. Part of the leaflet dropped by Col on his first op, to Emden, reminding Germans of Hitler’s ‘embarrassing promise’ that the war would be won by the end of 1941. (Collection Gordon Galloway)