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

by Stephen Harris

  This was the climate of escalating losses in which Col began his second tour of operations in February 1944. He had taken part in only one previous op in a Lancaster: the first of the firestorm raids against Hamburg, in July 1943. The night he died was just the second time, and I wondered whether the aircraft’s design might have helped to seal his fate. To begin to answer that, I needed to get a feel for the inside of a Lancaster. This is what took me to Lincolnshire in May 2008, to visit the base of the only aircraft of its type still flying in Britain. The Lancaster’s home, RAF Coningsby airbase, is just down the road from the wartime base of the legendary 617 ‘Dambusters’ Squadron, whose billet, the Tudor-style Petwood Hotel, was also my lodgings for the night. I had driven there from the 149 Squadron reunion at Mildenhall and arrived to find the hotel still in a flurry after the Dambusters’ reunion festivities the previous evening.

  At Coningsby next morning I entered a spacious hangar, as clean as a sports hall despite the array of wartime aircraft that operates from it. At the far end, the Lancaster’s condor-like, rising outer wings reached from wall to wall, its sleek lines no less impressive than in its heyday. A mechanic seemed as small as a doll up beside the bomber’s bulbous nose, as he restored the gleam to its perspex windows after its weekend of flying as star turn for the reunion. My guide asked me first to turn out my pockets of anything – coins, keys – that could fall into crevices and gum up the works, then ushered me inside its lichen-green fuselage through the main hatch, which is just forward of the tail’s starboard cross-piece.

  Crews praised the Lancaster’s speed and its ability to climb high and perform acrobatic manoeuvres that belied its size – as so many night fighters like Otto Fries also discovered the hard way. Its chances of evading danger were thus better, and it ended the war with a lower casualty rate than either of the RAF’s other two four-engined ‘heavies’, the Stirling and the Halifax. But the Lancaster was much harder to escape from once it was mortally damaged, and in that sense its designers sacrificed crew safety for aircraft performance.[2] This much was obvious the moment I stepped inside. The fuselage is an obstacle course, even when the aircraft is stationary and has light infiltrating through its windows. First comes the bell-housing of the dorsal gun turret, followed by the step up to the raised floor covering the bomb bay, which runs to just short of the nose; then the real trap – the main wing spar, which anchors the wings across the fuselage. This obstacle is as tall as the space remaining to climb over it – a large, flattened semi-circular opening arching to the height of a car wheel. Add to these obstructions the challenge of struggling free wearing a full flying suit and bulky sheepskin bomber jacket, and of being pinned by the centrifugal forces of a craft spinning out of control, possibly filled with flames and smoke. For me it was a sobering shuffle through a potentially deadly maze.

  Whatever bomber an airman flew in, his chances of making it through the war unscathed were slim. When Col finally persuaded his superiors in January 1944 to allow him to return to operations, he worsened his survival odds by volunteering for one of the most dangerous jobs in Bomber Command. His closest wartime friend, Barry Martin, had joined 7 Squadron of the Pathfinder Force (PFF) immediately after finishing his first tour in 1942, and was killed within a few months. Col joined this same squadron – one of the original four pathfinder squadrons – nearly a year later. The PFF was made up of crews chosen for their proven ability to find and hit a target under the most challenging circumstances. ‘Bomber’ Harris had opposed the formation of a pathfinder force, concerned that cherry-picking the best crews would strip regular squadrons of experience and leadership and perhaps lower both their morale and their effectiveness. After an intense debate, however, Harris had been overruled by his boss, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. By February 1944 the pathfinders were proving their worth by enabling the bomber stream to identify the target quickly, release its bombs accurately and get out without perilous delay.

  This contribution to improved performance came at a price. Pathfinders had to arrive ahead of the bomber stream, thus attracting the undivided attention of the prowling night fighters and the fresh fury of the searchlights and flak batteries. They generally added to their aerial flare marking with normal incendiary and blast bombs to highlight the target on the ground. After the initial pathfinders had departed from the scene, others known as ‘backers-up’ followed with fresh flares, to replace the earlier markers carried off course by wind and natural drift. The remarking was important to reduce the incidence of the bomber stream dropping its load in the wrong place, and to correct the ‘creep-back’ effect as nervy bomb aimers pressed the release ‘tit’ too soon in their eagerness to high-tail it away from the target.

  As bomb aimer, dropping target markers was Col’s job the night he died. Berlin lay obscured below unbroken cloud, forcing the pathfinder aircraft to use sky markers – parachute flares above the clouds – for the waves of bombers in their wake to ‘blind bomb’. The Germans called the green, red, yellow and white flares ‘Christmas trees’, and did their utmost to prevent these grim tidings from concentrating the deadly effect of the following main force.

  Otto Fries was always particularly pleased to shoot down a pathfinder. A 7 Squadron pathfinder aircraft lost during a raid on Brunswick (Braunschweig) on 14 January 1944 was probably one of three Lancasters he shot down that night. It seems unlikely Col had a chance to do his job over Berlin a month later before his Lancaster, too, attracted the attention of one of Otto’s colleagues – though the outcome of that duel was far from certain.

  That night, 15–16 February 1944, Col’s Lancaster was among 43 bombers lost on this single raid – four of them from his own 7 Squadron, which suffered the highest losses that night. Among the other casualties in the squadron was the oldest New Zealand pilot to die with Bomber Command, 39-year-old Squadron Leader John Hegman DSO, DFC, of Auckland, who lies with his crew near Col in the Berlin War Cemetery at Heerstrasse. His photo was published in the Weekly News beside Col’s on a page of New Zealand casualties some weeks later. Only three men survived among the four 7 Squadron crews shot down. A store of experience and skill was lost on this single raid – a wing commander, flying as second pilot to Hegman, and two squadron leaders were among the dead. The medal count of those four crews included two Distinguished Service Orders, one Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, eight DFCs, seven DFMs and one OBE.[3] In the course of almost seven months, as the Battle of Berlin raged in the skies, Lancasters of 7 Squadron took off 353 times. In all, 26 of its aircraft failed to return during the campaign, leaving 146 men dead and 39 in prisoner of war camps. As on the night Col and John Hegman died, 7 Squadron suffered the highest loss rate of any squadron during the Berlin campaign.[4] These were some of Bomber Command’s best crews, men who were on at least their second tour and who had therefore beaten the odds many times until then.

  7 Squadron’s losses, though extreme, were not unique among pathfinder squadrons, and by early 1944 the chances of getting shot down were increasing. From late summer 1943, German night fighters introduced a new attacking technique using upward-firing cannons, mounted rear of the cockpit and angled forward at 70 degrees. This enabled them to approach a bomber undetected and to open fire from beneath its undefended belly. Otto frequently used this so-called schräge Musik – slang for jazz – and said it made shooting down a bomber ‘almost routine’. This new technique meant night fighters could attack with virtual impunity – so long as they avoided firing on the bomb bays, which would risk detonating the load and bringing hellfire and destruction down on their own heads. Few bomber crews were warned of this unseen danger and many of them died without knowing what had hit them.[5]

  The dense cloud over Berlin did not spare it from misery on that February night. The 891 four-engined aircraft dispatched to attack the city made up the biggest bomber force Harris had sent against Germany since the Hamburg firestorm raids of the previous July and August, when Col had flown his previous op. The Berlin force carried 260
0 tonnes of bombs, nearly twice the 1430 tonnes dropped by 1000 bombers during the Operation Millennium attack on Cologne in May 1942.[6] The Battle of Berlin, from late August 1943 to March 1944, thus neared its end with a bigger bang than its previous 17 raids. That single raid destroyed more than 1000 residential buildings, as well as some important factories in the Siemens industrial district, near present-day Tegel Airport. At least 320 people died on the ground in Berlin and a further 59 in outlying areas hit by stray bombs.

  Harris had promised Churchill at the outset of the Battle of Berlin: ‘It will cost us between 400 to 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’ He was half right: it cost Bomber Command 492 aircraft – and more than 3000 crew – but it failed to pound the Germans into submission. The capital held out to the end, finally defeated only in the desperate street-by-street fighting against the Red Army in April and May 1945 – the Battle of Berlin on the ground.

  As the nights shortened and attacking such distant targets thus became even more dangerous, Harris turned his attention away from Berlin in late March 1944. The war lasted another 14 months. The 55,500 aircrew killed by its end made up nearly half of the 120,000 men who served with Bomber Command during the war.[7] Every one of them was a volunteer and almost every one an officer or a non-commissioned officer (NCO). In addition, nearly 10,000 had become prisoners of war and 8400 more had been wounded. On the basis of sheer numbers mustered, most were Britons, but New Zealand suffered disproportionately for a small country: with a wartime population of just under 1.5 million people, it lost 1850 of the 6000 men who left its shores to serve in Bomber Command.[8]

  This New Zealand fatality rate of nearly one in three comes close to New Zealand’s losses during the 1916 Battle of the Somme in northern France, when the death toll reached 40 per cent.[9] The scale of bloodshed in the trenches has come to symbolise the profligate waste of human life in wartime. Yet in the war that followed, the comparable losses suffered by Bomber Command are not nearly as widely known. On a purely statistical basis, stripping away skill and luck, an individual’s chances of surviving a tour of 30 operations were zero once the proportion of aircraft lost topped 3 per cent.[10] Well above this figure of one in 33, the actual loss rate was often much worse: during that bitter winter it frequently exceeded one-tenth of the aircraft dispatched on a given night and sometimes was more than one in eight, as the German defences reached the peak of their effectiveness in the early months of 1944.

  Generally, aircrew who survived their first tour were put on ground duties for six months, then required to return to operations. Col was unusual in that his superiors were trying their best to prevent him from flying again because, it seems, as navigation officer for 115 Squadron he was doing a particularly good job of training navigators. Col finally got his way, but at a point when volunteering to return to ops was akin to playing Russian roulette with more chambers loaded than empty. Why Col did so is a question that becomes harder, not easier, to answer with the distance of years. He knew that even if he did not die on this raid, he had volunteered to keep flying until his number would almost inevitably come up. I could not fathom this apparent will to self-sacrifice, what pushed him to this decision, but I hoped at the very least to find out what really happened to him the night his Lancaster, MG-‘W’ William, met its end. (Figure 12.1-12.18)

  Figure 12.1: Skipper Jock Watt, whom Col admired so much, at the controls of their Stirling in1942. (Collection Col Jones)

  Figure 12.2: The ‘flying wedding’ party at Church Stretton, Shropshire, about which Col (sitting at right) wrote in May 1942. Al Shoreman is standing at left next to Jock Watt. (Collection Col Jones)

  Figure 12.3: Leutnant Fries bearing the medals of his commanding officer, Walter Ehle, buried along with his crew at St Trond in November 1943. (Collection O-H Fries)

  Figure 12.4: Otto (far left) and Fred Staffa (3rd from right) play skat while waiting for combat orders in the readiness room at St Trond airbase, Belgium, in 1943. (Collection O-H Fries)

  Figure 12.5: Fries’s Messerschmitt ME110 at St Trond, Belgium, 1943. (Collection O-H Fries)

  Figure 12.6: A Heinkel HE219 after the German surrender, showing the SN2 radar ‘antlers’. (Collection O-H Fries)

  Figure 12.7: Paul Zorner after being awarded the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross in September 1944. By now he had shot down 58 RAF bombers. (Collection Paul Zorner)

  Figure 12.8: St Trond’s – and Germany’s – most successful night fighter, Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer, displaying ‘kills’ on his ME110 tailplane in 1943. Schnaufer’s total for the war was 121 bombers. One of his tailplanes is on display at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, the other at the Imperial War Museum in London. (Collection O-H Fries)

  Figure 12.9: A Luftwaffe padre at the grave of RAF airmen shot down during the first ‘thousand bomber’ raid, against Cologne in May 1942. They are being buried beside Otto’s airfield at St Trond, Belgium. (Collection O-H Fries)

  Figure 12.10: A flak tower, 40 metres high, in Hamburg, similar to those built in many major German cities during the war. (Paul Grant)

  Figure 12.11: Cockpit of a Heinkel HE219. (Collection O-H Fries)

  Figure 12.12: Kurt Köhn in February 2008, at the site of Col’s bomb crater near Penzlin. He is pointing towards Berlin and the approach path of the stricken Lancaster. (Stephen Harris)

  Figure 12.13: Col Jones’s headstone at the Heerstrasse Cemetery. (Stephen Harris)

  Figure 12.14: Professor Fries at his Berlin home in 2008. (Stephen Harris)

  Figure 12.15: Paul Zorner, 88, in 2007 at his managed care home in Homburg-Saar, south-west Germany. (Stephen Harris)

  Figure 12.16: The memorial at the centre of Hamburg’s Ohlsdorf mass grave depicts Charon, ‘death’s boatman’ of Greek mythology, ferrying souls across the River Styx to the afterlife. (Stephen Harris)

  Figure 12.17: Fred Coney in 2007, between the graves of ‘Ron’ Middleton VC (left) and Eric Wynn (right of picture), at Beck Row Cemetery, Mildenhall. (Stephen Harris)

  Figure 12.18: Berlin Commonwealth War Cemetery, Heerstrasse, on Remembrance Day 2004. (Stephen Harris)

  CHAPTER 13

  THE LAST NIGHT

  When I set out to find answers, the destruction of ‘W’ William had been a mystery for more than 60 years. The New Zealand Air Department had written to Col’s mother, Emma Jones, shortly after the war, but its brief account struck me as not only incomplete but also possibly misleading. I knew from this official version roughly when and where the Lancaster had come down, but little more than that. Living in Berlin, I was now close enough to return to the area as often as it took to put together a fuller picture – or so I hoped. The place where Col died lay in the former Russian zone, which had become the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after the war. The GDR was neither democratic nor was it honest about wartime experiences in its part of Germany, which the Soviets had occupied in 1945 and set up as a puppet state. The victors had rewritten the history of this part of Germany to suit their own political ends, and I knew that even if I could overcome the gaps or distortions in the official record, I would need a stroke of luck to find a firm path back to February 1944.

  Luck seemed already in short supply for the crew of ‘W’ William as the seven men clambered on board for their final operation. This had come as an unwelcome surprise to them; they had been expecting two weeks’ leave – or so the mother of one wrote to Emma Jones after their sons’ deaths. Another mother wrote that her son had invited Col to spend the leave with them in Scotland. But that would have to wait, and they soon found out why they had been added to the battle order for that night: ‘Bomber’ Harris had big plans, requiring all available aircraft. He wanted to round off the seven-month concentrated bombing campaign against Berlin with a show of force that would deal ‘the Big City’ a final blow. Col – ‘Jonah’ to the established crew he had joined only that month – had spent just 80 minutes in the air with them, including a short test flight that very morning, Tuesday 15 Febr
uary 1944. He knew he was in good company – a close-knit crew with whom he had quickly formed a bond: fellow Flight Lieutenant Roy Barnes DFC, pilot; Sergeant John Dalziel, aged 20, flight engineer from Northumberland; Pilot Officer Jim McLachlan DFC, 28, navigator from West Lothian in Scotland; Pilot Officer Raymond Bett, 23, wireless operator, from Stafford; Flight Sergeant ‘Eddie’ Marshall, 20, mid-upper gunner from Sheffield; and Flight Sergeant Edward Campbell, rear gunner. ‘W’ William had been in the thick of the Battle of Berlin, taking its crews safely to Germany’s capital and back nine times since it had arrived at 7 Squadron the previous September. Roy Barnes, Col and the other crew took it up at 11a.m. on 15 February for a 45-minute test flight. Then at 5.09p.m. – 6.09p.m. in Berlin – they took off into the thickening darkness. Col’s job as bomb aimer was to light up this flat, sprawling city, which offered little by way of helpful feedback to the ground-scanning H2S navigation and target-finding radar.

  What happened during the next three hours will never be known for sure, but I was able to track down a few people who remember that night and who have thrown new light on the version of events given to our family soon after the war. What we knew was limited to the sparsely worded description in a letter sent to Col’s mother – my great-grandmother – in January 1948 by the New Zealand Air Department, quoting the report of the post-war investigation into the loss of the aircraft.