I have forgotten exactly what Jock Watt said, but quite calmly, quite quietly, he called to us that there was no need to worry; we were still flying; we were coping. He told the front gunner who, as I have said, was not in our crew, not to fret. He would soon be out of his turret; and he ordered me to go and let him out. I did so. Then Jock set about trying to make ‘A’ Apple fly. The wireless operator for his part, having coped with the fire, set about trying to cope with the jigsaw ruin that was his set. The old ‘A’ Apple staggered about all over the sky, doing its own evasive action. We tried getting down into the cloud but conditions were dreadfully bumpy, with the worst icing I have ever seen, which made the machine all the more hard to control.
Jock did not say much after his first encouragement, and what little he did say was to the engineer, Eddie Owen. Eddie worked in silent grim desperation struggling with fast ebbing petrol. He shared with the skipper a knowledge of how bad things were. No-one else said anything at all. What was there to say? God knows how many times he changed tanks, with the situation worsening all the time; but of that period, my lasting impression is the kindness of Jock’s voice – he was usually impatient of engineers and their instructions – and the calmness of Eddie’s.
We staggered on. The coast, I knew, ought to be near, but I had no navigational means of discovering how near. The fighter damaged more than the petrol tanks. The cloud was 10/10ths below us and with slowness, but a dreadful inevitability, we were losing, ever losing, height. We did not know then, but we must have passed over Dunkirk at 4000ft – in a plane barely able to fly, let alone weave. We limped on and on, making for that part of the coast that was nearest England. The cloud was still 10/10ths and the first absolutely certain knowledge we had that we had crossed the coast was the sight far ahead of a beacon. I identified it as Manston and set course from there to Oxford Ness and base. Even then we were afraid to hope, thinking we might be mistaken. But before many minutes the unmistakable North Zeeland loomed up and we knew that we could at least hope again.
Jock Watt thought at first that we could make base, but remembering that the undercart might not come down, he turned and made for a ‘drome [Manston] near the Thames estuary that is known through the RAF as the ‘haven for lame ducks.’ We called up the ground, letting them know we were in trouble and were coming in to land. The skipper went to put the undercart down at that stage – but, no joy. The controls had been damaged by the fighter. ‘OK ‘Apple’ crash land on left of the flare path.’
‘Trouble with undercarriage, will call again.’ Had to wind it down by hand.
Port undercarriage down and starboard nearly but not quite. By that time, the fuel question was urgent. Just as soon as the green [warning] lights showed, the starboard outer cut. Then flying at 600ft [altitude]. Turned cross wind when [outer] port engine cut. Turned away from flare path, but could not maintain height on two motors; losing height down to 150ft. All balance cocks were then turned on and they picked up again. When all four came on again and aircraft returned to flare path we managed to get to 400ft in direction of flare path. Then with Manston funnel coming up, both inner engines cut, down to 30ft having just cleared a wood, then up again when all four cut.
‘We’re for it blokes, hang tight.’ She hung for a second, then she hit, rolled on and crossed a road, struck a ditch, took off for 90 yards, landed again, passed between two telegraph poles taking the wire with it, crossed several gardens, slewed to starboard and came to rest with the front turret concertinaed against the back wall of a house – unoccupied, but those on either side were occupied. The port undercart collapsed. Thought the skipper was badly hurt because his face was covered in blood. He yelled out ‘all out. Hurry!’ There was a small fire in the starboard inner, so I hopped up with the extinguisher. Fortunately, it went out by itself. Then we all went and had copious cups of tea in one of the houses.
I forgot to say that the collapsed undercart and the wing came to rest over an Anderson shelter in which were two small children. We got them out uninjured and the first thing the little boy said was ‘coo, what sort of machine was it?’ They were in the shelter because an air raid warning was on. Went to Manston, had some food, had a sleep and came back to base about 11am. Interrogated – lunch and breakfast together – bacon and egg first and then roast beef after – and now I am going to bed.
This episode produced a couple of exciting finds during my search. One was Watt’s combat report, which I obtained from the National Archive in London; the other was a photo of their Stirling crashed into the row of houses, sent to me from the United States by the author of a book on the history of 149 Squadron. For Col, this episode and his earlier ditching in the English Channel won him the Distinguished Flying Cross, which he received from King George VI at Buckingham Palace in February 1943. The citation noted:
Pilot Officer Frank Colwyn JONES, Royal New Zealand Air Force, No. 149 Squadron, has participated, as navigator, in attacks on many of the enemy’s most important targets. During a sortie over Essen, in June 1942, his aircraft was badly holed by fire from ground defences; later it was attacked by an enemy fighter. The aircraft was so badly damaged that it was necessary to alight in the sea but Pilot Officer Jones, whilst in the dinghy, maintained an accurate plot of its position until the crew were rescued. During another sortie, in August, 1942, his accurate navigation was responsible for the safe return of his aircraft which had been seriously damaged by an enemy fighter. Pilot Officer Jones has displayed high courage and extreme devotion to duty.[3]
Col was by then all too familiar with the destructive power of the Luftwaffe’s night fighters – but also with the RAF’s capacity to hit back. A little over two weeks after Col’s crash landing in Kent, Otto had his first brush with the enemy – and with the ‘wingtips of lady eternity’ – which resulted in his being shot down by a Stirling’s rear gunner. Like Col, Otto defied death many times: forced to bale out four times, attacked by a British night fighter while landing once and suffering wounds significant enough to be decorated twice for them. But by a series of miracles he and Fred ended the war with their health – if little else – intact. Now I felt the lucky one as the 90-year-old professor told me his story. With remarkable immediacy and detail, Otto-Heinrich Fries brought back to life the perils of night combat over Germany from the perspective of one of the men trying to kill my great-uncle.
CHAPTER 9
INTERCEPTOR
During the massive raids on Cologne and Hamburg, Otto Fries flew in hopeless confusion. His job was to intercept and snuff out the arsonists, whose bombs were engulfing the homes and factories below in a sea of flames. But despite the hundreds of bombers churning the air about him over Cologne in May 1942 and Hamburg in July 1943, he failed to attack a single aircraft. Even by the latter raid, Otto had yet to claim his first kill. But his despair on both occasions went much deeper: he shared the German defenders’ sense of powerlessness at the overwhelming scale of the fury being unleashed by Bomber Command. ‘I saw all of Germany’s cities in flames, but that [Cologne] was the first city I saw really in flames. The sight was entsetzlich, shocking. We saw the city burning, we knew there were thousands of people in cellars down below and we were hanging up there able to do absolutely nothing to stop it.’
The night fighter pilots were used to Raumjagd – being guided one by one to a particular bomber, by ground controllers responsible for a specific zone. ‘Raumjagd was a reasonably comfortable affair, but suddenly we were faced with a completely new tactic from the British. That night over Cologne the bombers came in masses. For the first time we were given clearance to free-hunt – the so-called wilde Sau, the ‘wild boar’ approach – but there were too many machines, we couldn’t settle on one. I couldn’t get behind a bomber, they were racing about from all directions, and the Lichtenstein [on-board radar] had so many squiggles on its screens it was going crazy.’ After Cologne, the Luftwaffe changed its tactics fundamentally, sending up more fighters and giving them greater scope to free-hunt.
Not until more than a year later did Otto Fries shoot down his first bomber, but from then on success came steadily, adding to the staggering scale of losses German night fighters began inflicting on Bomber Command from late 1943 onwards.
Cologne had been a deeply demoralising experience for Otto, but he felt an even greater sense of powerless rage as he flew above the blazing city of Hamburg in July 1943. The Gomorrah raids were the first time Bomber Command spread radar-jamming metallised strips from aircraft to overwhelm German radar with a blizzard of decoys. Called ‘window’ by the RAF and Düppel by the Luftwaffe, it literally foiled the German defences and forced the night fighters to rely largely on the naked eye. In the months that followed Gomorrah the Luftwaffe success rate dropped: their radar completely blinded by window, the night fighters felt they were reduced to chasing ghosts across the sky. Otto knew of at least one senior Luftwaffe pilot over Hamburg during Gomorrah who simply returned to base, such was the confusion created by the strips: ‘I was fassungslos – struck dumb. I had such a rage in my belly that I couldn’t do anything – I wanted to bale out of the aircraft, I felt so helpless.’
Otto struck back a month later, in August 1943, shooting down his first bomber as described in Chapter 5. On 22 October 1943 Otto shot down his second bomber in conditions that were almost hauntingly surreal, showing how weather could both enchant and imperil aircrew. Otto and Fred were by then also carrying a rear gunner, Konrad Deubzer, to keep an eye out for prowling RAF night fighters so that Fred could concentrate on radio communications and radar. Soon after taking off at 7p.m. to intercept bombers heading for the central city of Kassel, they found themselves blinded twice over: first by radio distortion and second by the weather. The ground to air radio guidance to their targets was being blocked by bombers equipped with special radar-jamming devices, so all Fred could hear was a signal that alternated between a sound like an electric drill in masonry and a continuous succession of claxon-like blasts they named ‘the bagpipes’. Lacking help from the ‘eyes on the ground’, Otto climbed to 6000 metres and flew towards where he estimated the bomber stream would pass. That was when the second ‘blinding’ began: as he climbed higher a dense wall of cloud gathered ominously, and soon he was flying ‘as if swimming in a milky brew’, with only his instruments to determine the ME110’s position relative to the horizon and the ground.
On nights when nimbus thundercloud brewed over Europe, it held aloft ice particles and conjured a magical play of electricity about Otto’s Messerschmitt ME110. Flickering small blue flames – St Elmo’s fire – danced from the antler-like radar antennae and appeared as a wave of cool, blue foam on the leading edges of wings and in phosphorescent circles around the twin propellers. Beneath the Messerschmitt’s long canopy, sitting in the darkness, Otto and his two crew were enchanted by the electrical display. What appeared as miniature storms of forked lightning danced on the armour-plated glass windscreen and when Otto ran his flying gloves along the plexiglass beside him it crackled and spat small charges from the glass surface. Otto joked: ‘We’re being stalked by a ghost and it’s nowhere near midnight yet. I wonder what sort of fantastic ghost story Edgar Allen Poe or E.T.A. Hoffmann would make out of this!’ Fred shot back: ‘That explains why my radio is completely dead, although it’s in perfect working order and I’ve got everything switched on. Let’s quit this magic show and turn around. In this crap we’re not only blind, but deaf and dumb as well. Even if a Tommy [Englishman] flew straight past he’d be able to tickle our wings without us seeing him.’
Otto turned the plane back on its course and nosed it down to 4500 metres. As he did so the electricity dancing on the leading surfaces diminished and before long they emerged from the mist and Otto could soon pick out the horizon below the thick cloak of cloud. The radio distortion did not abate, however, so Fred left the R/T on ‘receive’ and Otto began searching for targets by sweeping the nose back and forth in a snaking motion, trying with the help of Fred and the on-board radar to ‘sniff out’ any bomber unlucky enough to find itself in the 45-degree wedge in front of their ME110. Nothing.
Then a brief burst from the ground control: ‘Eagle 98 from Kingfisher [ground control’s call-sign for that night]. Adjust 300 degrees to your present course. Courier approaching you at 40 to 45 degrees...’ Then static. Otto banked sharply to port. Fred reported he was still picking up nothing on the three radar circles, which indicated the altitude, distance and position to port or starboard of a target. Then a smudge: ‘I’ve got something – but it seems to be just Düppel’. No sooner had Fred dismissed it as a target than Otto saw a large, dark shadow pass quickly underneath, heading the way they had just come.
As Otto swung the ME110 again steeply to port he calculated in his head the compass fix needed to set him on the bomber’s tail. When the needle came around to 120 degrees he levelled the aircraft on its course – but there was no sign yet of the bomber on Fred’s radar screens. ‘Take off after him, we’ve got some catching up to do,’ Fred said. Otto opened the throttle and the ME110’s speed picked up to 430 kilometres per hour. ‘The stupid mutt!’ said Fred suddenly. ‘Classic case – he’s had the bright idea a nasty night fighter may pop up in the vicinity and he has to hide himself, so he’s chucking out a bundle of Düppel every few seconds and spreading out a lovely welcome mat for us to follow. He’s just two Kah-Ems [kilometres] ahead of us.’
Otto switched his guns from safety and levered up his seat to bring his line of vision level with the reflector-gunsight, then he adjusted the light on the sights – bright enough to see the markings but not so bright as to spoil his night vision. Fred counted down the distance and when the ME110 was a kilometre behind the bomber Otto throttled back to avoid overtaking it. Fred guided him in: ‘Distance 500 metres – a bit higher, left slightly ... Distance 300, a bit higher, right slightly.’ Then Otto saw the shadow, just above the horizon and silhouetted clearly against the night sky. ‘I see him, you can switch the radar off.’
He flicked the safety cover forward from the top of the control stem so that his thumb was on the firing button for the two 20-millimetre cannons mounted under the nose, and made ready to squeeze the control stem trigger for the four machine guns. An accurate burst of just a few seconds was usually enough proof of the devastating combination of this firepower. Otto drew closer, positioning his ME110 behind and to port, so the bomber remained silhouetted just above the horizon. ‘It’s a Short Stirling,’ the Bordfunker and gunner said in unison over the intercom. Otto snapped back: ‘Shut up, will you? You’re putting me off with your blabber.’
Otto crept closer to what was, in fact, a Lancaster – EM-‘R’ Roger of 207 Squadron, based at Spilsby, near the Lincolnshire coast. Unusually, she carried a crew of eight that night, instead of seven. The pilot, Squadron Leader Alexander Lyons McDowell, was a married man from Vancouver, one of four Canadians on board, including the rear gunner. ‘Hurry up and shoot before he sees us,’ urged Fred.
‘Quiet, quiet – just a little bit closer...’
Suddenly the rear end of the Lancaster blazed into action. Lines of tracer fire shot past the ME110, then there was a hard, sharp crack and Otto felt a stab of pain in his left calf muscle. ‘He’s got me in the left leg!’ Instinctively he darted the ME110 to the right in a mid-air sidestep, then tugged lightly at the control stem to bring the bomber’s rear gunner into his sights, blasting him with a short machine-gun burst. Otto Fries said this was the only time he intentionally shot to kill. The rear gunner, curled behind a thin skin bubble of plexiglass and the rack of machine guns, stood no chance under a hail of nearly 100 bullets a second.
Swinging the fighter back to port, Otto unleashed a second burst into the Lancaster’s left wing, this time also using his twin cannons. Despite the blinding effect of the muzzle flashes from his own nose guns, he saw the explosions as the cannon shells struck. Suddenly the plane reared up and the damaged wing simply snapped off – Otto even heard the sharp crack. With its remaining wing leading the strick
en bomber in an horrific dance, the dismembered Lancaster spiralled to the ground. Otto lost sight of it, until a few seconds later he saw a massive impact explosion, which shot out several lightning-like cascades. The detached wing, freed of its body, spun like a flaming sycamore seed to the ground, striking a minute after the main wreckage and in a similar but smaller fireball. Fred noted the time – 8.35p.m. – and radioed ground control: ‘Kingfisher from Eagle 98 – Sieg Heil – request location’.
‘Viktor, understood – congratulations – stand by.’
Ground control radioed co-ordinates showing the Lancaster had come down south-east of Aachen, near the town of Nettersheim in the Eifel hills, west of Cologne. Nettersheim’s mayor later informed Otto that he had watched the exchange of fire from the ground and had cycled to the crash site – a crater 8 metres deep and 25 metres across. Nothing remained of the Lancaster apart from fragments spread over a wide area. Its eight crew lie today in the Rheinberg War Cemetery, just inside the German border with the Netherlands city of Nijmegen.[1] Otto was uninjured. The stabbing pain in his leg had been caused by a ricocheting bullet that had struck a parachute flare strapped to his flying boot but had not ignited it.
By Otto’s fourth kill – a Stirling with 75 (NZ) Squadron he shot down on 19 November south-west of Brussels – he was becoming practised at attacking from below and behind, then ducking off to the side to avoid answering fire. What makes this encounter stand out, however, is that three of the crew survived to describe in detail what it was like to be on the receiving end of Otto’s guns. The Australian pilot and English navigator evaded capture and were able to debrief RAF investigators two months after the episode, once they had made it back to England. The third survivor – bomb aimer Jack Hyde, RNZAF – wrote from Christchurch more than 40 years later a brief account of how the bomber exploded just as he was jumping out. Hyde concluded that the blast had opened his parachute, since he regained consciousness only after hitting the ground, breaking his pelvis and spitting out two teeth as he came to. He spent the next year in German military hospitals before being interned in a prisoner of war camp. Of the seven crew, four were killed, including the 23-year-old wireless operator, Pilot Officer Bill Kell, of Dannevirke. The RAF loss report noted what the pilot, Flight Sergeant Noel Parker, and navigator Sergeant Robert Griffith remembered of what happened:
Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany Page 11