The attrition rate among the night fighters rose steeply as the war entered its last two years. The increasing scarcity of fuel for training and the pressure on the Luftwaffe to replenish squadrons depleted by losses led to condensed instruction programmes for newer pilots that, almost literally, became crash courses for many. Increasingly, too, the German Nachtjagdgeschwadergruppen – night fighter groups – were finding themselves outgunned: under attack from RAF Mosquitoes by night, and confronting an increasingly dense swarm of Thunderbolt and Mustang single-engined fighters escorting the US heavy bombers by day.
After the D-Day landings in June 1944 the Allies were able to fly fighter escorts from bases on the continent. As they advanced beyond the belt of coastal radar stations they deprived the Germans of much of their means of detecting bombers approaching across the water from Britain. Outgunned and partially blindfold, the German air defence was completely overwhelmed. Some former German daytime fighter pilots belonging to the Berlin Jägerkreis of former Luftwaffe airmen told me that by late 1944 they were routinely outnumbered 10 to one by US fighters when attempting to attack bombers in daylight, and if they shot down a US fighter it was ‘pure luck’.
The night fighters were not as routinely exposed as their daytime colleagues, but their losses also climbed steeply as the war turned against Germany. For each of the five months to October 1944, the Luftwaffe lost an average of 2600 aircrew, more than treble the monthly average of 775 killed during the previous three and a half years.[2] The younger crews, with less experience and shorter training, had the poorest life expectancy. Professor Fries recalled the arrival at his squadron in October 1944 of 10 new crew pairings. By Christmas that year all 20 young men were dead.
That Christmas of 1944 Otto could find little to ease his despondency over Germany’s deteriorating fortunes. He had spent every Christmas so far with his family in the Pfalz, the Rhineland Palatinate region bordering France and Luxembourg, but now the war had drawn too close. Paris had fallen to the Allies in August, though not everything was going the Allies’ way. In Holland in September, the Germans had repulsed the biggest airborne assault in history, when 40,000 Allied troops attempted to capture the Rhine bridges around Arnhem. Then, in December, Germany had unleashed half a million men and 500 tanks in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, along the Luxembourg–Belgium border, thrusting deep into US positions and shattering the Allies’ belief they would be in Berlin by Christmas. Despite these demonstrations of continued German tenacity, however, Otto and his companions knew the war was lost.
One Bavarian in Otto’s squadron had used most of his 10 days’ recent leave trying to return from his home, a journey disrupted frequently by bomb damage to railway lines. With the Allied advance on the ground in Europe, Otto’s squadron had been relocated further east into Germany itself, to Münsterland, near the Dutch border. Even though this airbase was much closer to his home than the Bavarian’s, he opted that Christmas to remain at his barracks in the convent. As dusk gathered he sat in the elegant chamber he had shared with Paul Stieghorst, killed just a few days before. Otto stared forlornly at a festive arrangement his mechanic, a gardener in civilian life, had fashioned for him from the branches of a fir tree. Shimmering with candles, the arrangement became a shrine to his close friend. Otto thought of the joyous anticipation experienced on Christmas Eve during his childhood and wondered what had become of ‘peace on earth, good will to all men’.
Earlier that day, just after lunch in the canteen, the nuns had tried to lift the men’s spirits by singing Christmas carols – in the full knowledge that once darkness fell, they would prepare to take off against the enemy. As dusk fell, Otto and his fellow aircrew drove gloomily to their readiness room on the edge of the airfield. The waning moon had disappeared from sight, but the weather forecast this frost-hard night promised it would be starry and clear above a layer of mist. The bus pressed on through a fog that was expected to produce a heavy frost in the early hours of Christmas Day.
The only concession to the season in the readiness room was a Christmas fir tree, but there on the wall was Adolf Hitler’s photo, and instead of tinsel or streamers the familiar models of RAF bombers hung from the ceiling like decoy ducks in flight. The crews lounged disconsolately in armchairs or dabbled at chess. No one could be bothered playing skat, usually their favourite card game. A few drank coffee – never Otto, as it kept him awake well after he had landed and was safely back in bed.
After they had been waiting about two hours, the alarm sounded, sending them all scrabbling into their lockers for life jackets, flying gloves, flare cartridges, radio and navigation booklets. Once the crew bus reached the tarmac, Otto and his mechanic had an exchange of forced joviality, then Otto and Fred climbed the flip-ladder into their respective ends of the bubble cockpit, which the mechanic closed over them. As Otto went through the routines of checking his switches and equipment, his sense of isolation was made worse by the condensation freezing on every surface of cabin glass. He grew warm rubbing vigorously with his flying glove to clear his windows. Otto could see the mechanic turning to a totem pole in the freezing cold outside while he waited for the green light for engine ignition.
The light came, the engines burst into motion and the mechanic pulled the cords to free the wheel chocks. As the Heinkel taxied towards its starting position on the runway, Fred exchanged passwords with the control tower, which gave the all-clear to take off. Once again, Otto went through the intensive ritual of checking all instrumentation, surrendering his instincts to its myriad readings, then took off north into the void of darkness and mist. The ground control instructed him to turn 180 degrees towards the enemy, flying at 5000 metres.
Climbing through 4000 metres and donning his oxygen mask, Otto saw they had left the mist below and were once again in the company of the moon, its weak light shimmering in reflection on the plane’s wings. He levelled off at 8000 metres and drew back the engine throttles to reduce the power he had needed for the ascent. The instructions from the ground were so disparate Otto felt they were like clues in a scavenger hunt. Then, suddenly, orders came for all night fighters in the region to head for a point south-west of Otto’s current position.
But they were too late. Already Otto could see the target-marking coloured parachute flares they all called ‘Christmas trees’ – for once, the term seemed perversely apt, though with tidings of hellfire. The darkness below was already flashing with explosions, which quickly seemed to flow into one, like a lake of molten lava. Otto thrust forward the throttle levers, arrowing the Heinkel down at more than 700 kilometres per hour towards where he judged the bombers would be crossing above the target. By the time he had the flames beneath him, however, the attack had finished, leaving no sign of the bombers but just a blizzard of distortion on Fred’s tracking radar.
The ground control directed them into a three-quarter turn and reported bombers spread between 3500 metres and 5000 metres. Otto turned the Heinkel into the moon’s face, which transformed the mist below him into a milky pond, while behind him in the east the red flames of the burning target spread a glimmering band, like an inverted sunset. He knew the bombers must be ahead somewhere, but Fred’s radar screens were still snowed. ‘Fred, turn that piece of junk off and help me look,’ Otto said as he began snake-nosing the Heinkel back and forth in search of prey.
Suddenly, twin lines of tracer-laced fire crossed from left and right simultaneously in front of them, like Christmas fairy lights, as the trigger-happy gunners of two bombers mistook each other for a night fighter. Otto dipped the Heinkel under the archway of the tracer streams. The darkness swallowed their sources as suddenly as they had appeared and for half an hour Otto searched in vain for at least one of these bombers, before he gave up the ghostly pursuit and turned for home, landing in thick mist.
Two hours later, just before midnight and Christmas Day, and after the mist had fallen, Otto stepped out into the night silence and was spellbound by a star canopy clearer and brighte
r than he could remember ever having seen it. The mist had come down to earth this Christmas, seemingly drawing the heavens closer. All around lay a frost already crisp and even. He yearned for peace.
Otto had nothing to celebrate that Christmas. When he did have an occasion to mark, it was rarely with wine, despite his origins and his regular trips to his vineyard home. He often brought a bottle or two back with him from leave, but he never stocked up for a regular tipple. With the possibility of the RAF attacking on any given night, the crews knew a clear head was part of the formula not just for success but also for survival. If they were grounded by the weather, the non-commissioned crews always headed off to the pub or the soldiers’ mess and drank either beer or liqueur, rather than wine. Only the officers habitually drank wine, but not Otto, even after he was promoted to Leutnant. One who tasted Otto’s offering enjoyed it so much that he asked for a case to be sent north. He was killed in action that night. Then another fellow officer said he would take over the wine order in his dead comrade’s place – but he, too, was killed the following night. The case of wine never left Otto’s home cellars.
Nor were more senior veteran crews immune. Unlike the RAF, the Luftwaffe did not screen, or ground, crews after a set number of operations, so the policy of ‘fly until you die’ also claimed many of the most seasoned pilots by the war’s end. Among the most distinguished Luftwaffe aces to die late in the war were the commander of Fries’ 1st Night Fighter Group, Major Walter Ehle, and the commander of 3rd Night Fighter Group, Colonel Helmut Lent. Both had been awarded the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves for their staggering tally of bombers shot down: 38 and 110 aircraft, respectively. Lent received the ultimate garnishing of swords and diamonds to his oak leaves, Germany’s highest military honour at the time. Both died in accidents, Lent when an engine cut out while he was attempting to land at an airfield in north-western Germany, in October 1944, and Ehle when he crashed into trees beyond his airstrip at St Trond in November 1943, killing himself and his two crew. Even the war’s end did not spare another St Trond ace and Germany’s top-scoring night fighter, Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer. He downed 121 bombers during the war, including seven Lancasters in one 14-minute killing spree on 21 February 1945. Then in 1950, having survived the war, he was killed near Bordeaux when his open-topped sports car crashed into a truck, bringing its load of metal gas cylinders down on top of him.
By the winter of 1943–4 Otto Fries and his colleagues were attending a funeral ceremony for comrades every week to 10 days. But the death of Walter Ehle was different. He was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, though still only in his late twenties. Ehle was aloof in the Prussian military tradition and all the pilots looked up to him, Otto included. ‘I was shocked. He was an exceptional pilot. He was my boss – my Gruppenkommandeur. We couldn’t come to terms with the fact he had crashed on landing; we couldn’t understand how this could have happened.’ Otto had grown accustomed to losing comrades, but with Ehle’s death he saw it could happen to any one of them. Though the youngest Leutnant on the squadron, Otto was asked to carry the Ordenkissen, the cushion on which all Ehle’s medals were displayed at the funeral, to be buried with the ace.
The opposing airmen were jousting on a tightrope, with often the slightest turn of luck determining who would prevail and who would become yet another casualty. The evening of the day Col helped to bury Eric Wynn beside Mildenhall airbase in August 1942, he flew off to bomb Nuremberg, where Otto tilled the darkness in his Messerschmitt without reward, before being shot down himself – on his mother’s birthday. For Otto’s colleagues, however, this was among the most successful night’s hunting of the war so far, accounting for one in seven of the 160 aircraft dispatched to Nuremberg – among them the Stirling of Wing Commander Cecil Charlton-Jones, who had flown Col and his crew back to base after their rescue from the English Channel a few months before.
CHAPTER 12
ABOARD THE ‘FLYING COFFIN’
The Winter of 1943–4 was a bleak time for Bomber Command, a war of attrition in the air that killed Col and many thousands of others on both sides. Col began his second tour in February 1944 in a bomber the Luftwaffe night fighter pilots nicknamed the ‘flying coffin’ – the Avro Lancaster. Harris called it his ‘shining sword ... the greatest single factor in winning the war’.[1] Although undoubtedly the finest RAF bomber of the war, it could also be a death trap when shot down, and the glee of many of the Luftwaffe night fighters responsible for this destruction was tempered with sympathy as they watched their quarry plunge earthwards, knowing the crews inside had little hope of escaping.
Did the Lancaster deserve the name the Germans gave it, and did Col and the tens of thousands of others who flew in this famous aircraft during the war feel it reduced their odds of survival? What must it have been like to be confined in this tube of explosives for up to eight hours at a time in the darkness? And then to be swatted about the sky, as Germans flung burning metal all around and the desperate pilot bent and buckled the rules of gravity to throw his huge craft into any available hole in the blackness? I hoped that finding answers to these questions would help me to understand better how Col experienced the last hour of his life.
I had other questions too. How could RAF bomber crew losses have climbed to such a staggering rate at exactly the time this legendary aircraft was becoming the mainstay of Bomber Command? And why was Col, who had completed his first tour in 1942, so determined to rejoin the fight late the following year, when the chances of surviving were getting worse? Part of the answer to both questions was a belief, that winter, that Germany would be defeated, and the Allied high command seemed intent on pushing its advantage, whatever the cost. Indeed, the tide of war began to turn against Germany soon after Col stopped flying operations from Lakenheath in October 1942. Col shared this growing optimism, and he wanted to ride this tide to victory in a bomber, not watch from the ground.
After failing to destroy its air defences in the Battle of Britain in summer 1940, Germany had abandoned its plans to invade Britain, but the steady change in Germany’s fortunes began two years later, with the defeat of Germany’s most famous Field Marshal, Erwin Rommel, at El Alamein in November 1942. This began the retreat from North Africa and the Mediterranean, while the German surrender at Stalingrad in February 1943 quickened the ebb-flow on the eastern front. At sea, the once-mighty surface fleet of the German Kriegsmarine had been either sunk or driven to find sanctuary in coastal waters, so that the U-boat ‘wolf packs’ remained the last serious threat to Britain’s maritime supply lines.
Col’s letters home reflect the firming conviction in Britain that the Allies were on the road to victory – and his belief that bombing Germans out of their homes was a fully justified means of ruining their appetite for war and punishing them for the destruction and misery they had unleashed across Europe. By the time Col wrote home at Christmas 1942, he believed the Germans had put themselves so far beyond any notions of human decency that they deserved no mercy:
Europe will be over before the war in the East. Some think here that Turkey will come in on the Allies’ side finally. That may be; but Hitler is doomed – and damned. There was a remarkable demonstration in the House [of Commons] the other day. All the members stood for a moment to express their horror at the Nazi atrocities on the Jews. God help the Nazis when the war goes against them, for no-one else will be able to. I have seen documented photographs from Russia of what the Germans have done. It makes you sick to look at some of them.
Two months later, in February 1943, Col forecast that Bomber Command was winding up to deliver the knock-out blow to Germany:
I think that the war in Europe is taking a definite turn for the better. The RAF is giving Germany sheer hell in the air. The newspapers here recently published an aerial photograph of Düsseldorf. The place is a shambles, literally. We are systematically doing to the Ruhr what the Nazis boasted they did to Warsaw, Rotterdam and tried to do to London. They are in for terrible things as the summer and
the autumn come on. Every night we hear the continual drone as hordes of heavy aircraft pass over on their way out. Larger numbers go now than when I was flying, and larger numbers will go all the time. We are losing more aircraft, but the proportion of losses to numbers is hardly any higher. Jerry is doing his best to reinforce the crumbling defences of the Ruhr, but whatever he does, the boys still get through.
By late 1943 Bomber Command was growing in strength by the day – and showing what this meant by night. Yet the air over Europe remained one of the deadliest places to wage war, and as the methods of killing became more sophisticated and the resources devoted to this task increased, the casualty rate among airmen on both sides and the toll of civilian dead in German cities climbed. Churchill, knowing an assault by land on German-held territory would be suicidal at that point, argued to Stalin that the nightly aerial onslaught by Bomber Command represented the second front the Soviet leader was urging. The bombing was clearly drawing off pressure from the beleaguered Soviet Union, as more and more German men and firepower were being transferred from the eastern front to the west to help staunch the waves of RAF bombers by night and the US attacks by day. By the end of 1943 the Luftwaffe had become primarily a defensive element in the air war in the west, deploying some two million personnel to defend against bombers taking off from England.
But this extensive German aerial minefield of radar, searchlights, flak guns and night fighters was inflicting enormous losses on the bomber force. After a massive build-up of men and machines through the first half of 1943, Bomber Command was equipped to carry out large raids on Germany on a consistent basis through the winter of 1943–4. But in this show of strength, Bomber Command was not alone; the Luftwaffe night fighters also reached their peak strength and effectiveness during this period. In just one example of the terrible consequences for the RAF, more airmen were killed in the 95 bombers downed during one night operation to Nuremberg in March 1944 than died serving with Fighter Command during the entire Battle of Britain in 1940.
Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany Page 16