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

by Stephen Harris

  It turned out I had been under a misconception about Marzahn, which an earlier inquiry had confused with ‘Marihn’, where Col’s Lancaster came down. But my trip to Marzahn was not wasted. People walking through its cemetery gates are immediately reminded of the reason Col visited Berlin: a telephone box-sized monument carved to resemble a Schwurhand – a hand swearing an oath – remembers victims of the bombing buried in its grounds. It reads: ‘To remind you living of 3330 victims of the bombing terror.’ Apart from some preserved ruins, mostly churches, in various cities, this Marzahn stone was the first monument specifically to bombing victims that I had seen anywhere in Germany during seven years of travelling the country extensively. I later visited the mass grave for the 37,000 victims of the Hamburg bombings, but even this smaller one at Marzahn was a rare entry in the other side of the balance sheet of wartime suffering and remembrance.

  Berlin’s ghosts can be found in almost every neighbourhood. Closer to my home and not far beyond the rubble mound of Devil’s Hill the affluent villa district of Grunewald begins. Here history has stopped in its tracks. One concrete-stepped pedestrian tunnel leading up from an underpass, and next to the others from which commuters come and go, leads to the memorial, Gleis 17. From this platform, more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were freighted off to death camps between October 1941 and March 1945. A stretch of rail tracks on weathered sleepers is lined with rusted iron duckboards, edged along both sides of the entire platform with dates, numbers deported, destinations. They detail a bureaucratic regularity that is robotic, and impossible to equate with a civilised human society. Platform 17 was an example of what German Jewish émigré and political theorist Hannah Arendt called the ‘banality of evil’ – running to timetables and output quotas. The most common destination is Theresienstadt concentration camp, Czechoslovakia. Most consignments, some on consecutive days, number exactly 100. From late 1942 the numbers of each deportation increase sharply to between 1000 and 1800 as Auschwitz enters the schedule. The Nazis agreed to this new dimension to the ‘Final Solution’, the extermination camps, in January that year at the Wannsee Conference, not far down the line from Grunewald. The size of the human consignments drops to the hundreds, then dozens, towards the end of the war as Berlin’s Jewish community is eradicated.

  Such monuments make it easier to understand why Germany still finds it so difficult to mourn or honour publicly those who died in uniform during the Second World War. Germany has an official remembrance day, Volkstrauertag, which is marked a week after the British observe Remembrance Day, on the Sunday closest to 11 November – the day the Armistice came into effect in 1918. I represented New Zealand at a Volkstrauertag ceremony in Berlin in 2006 – apparently the first time our embassy had been invited. I was one of only four civilian diplomats, rendered drab and invisible among at least two dozen military attachés from other embassies, in their braid and medal ribbons. The ceremony was a grand affair, with a brass band and a snappy naval detail bearing flaming torches in the twilight, casting angled shadow-giants against the imposing, tomb-like memorial behind. A sea of wreaths, including New Zealand’s, filled a channel between us and the naval honour guard.

  I recalled the first time I attended an Allied Remembrance Day service at Heerstrasse Commonwealth War Cemetery, where the graves of Col and his six fellow crew members are among 3695 from the Second World War. The Philip Hepworth-designed cemetery is a beautiful resting place, and on that November morning in 2004 I arrived well ahead of time. Overnight the first heavy frost of winter had fallen, creating a hush among the solid rows of white headstones. I felt as though I had been placed in the wordless company of the mourned – a spell that lifted gradually as the growing numbers of arrivals smudged green footfalls in the frost.

  At the German ceremony two years later, I found the grandeur typical of the deadening effect of most military ceremonies I have attended around the world. The men in uniform far outnumbered the few city officials and the modest gathering of family who had turned out to pay their respects. Away from the bugler, the brass band and the torches, a flat field lay quilted with the concrete plaques marking the graves of hundreds of German soldiers – or more probably older men and teenage boys – who died defending the city from the advancing Russians in the early months of 1945. For me the point of this ceremony, what salvaged its personal dimension from the industry of ritual, came in one instant. Four old men – two German and two Russian – shuffled forward in their loosely fitting suits, linked arms around each others’ backs and laid a wreath to their brotherhood and reconciliation – at the end, comrades in arms.

  During my travels through eastern Germany I came across monuments to the Russian dead of that war much more frequently than I found German war memorials. Post-war East German ideology cast the Russians as liberators and portrayed the war as a Nazi travesty against the German worker. This flick of the historical cape placed the East Germans in league with the ‘victors’ of 1945 – with their Soviet brothers who had ‘rescued’ them. This self-deception helped East Germany not only to distance its citizens from their own role in supporting and sustaining Nazism, but also to justify a continuation of totalitarian rule as ‘protection’ against the common ‘class enemy’.

  The end of the East German state in 1990 left an awkward legacy, which many people who grew up under that regime would still prefer to ignore. The north-eastern town of Penzlin, where Col Jones met his death, reflects this ambivalence. Here I found this debate stirring after more than half a century of politically induced sleep. Pastor Hartmuth Reincke and Kurt Köhn were among a small group who wanted to establish a memorial to those from the town who died in the Second World War, just as the oak panels in the Marienkirche remembered the fallen of the First. Reincke and Köhn estimated the number from the later war would come to between 150 and 200 names.

  In attempting to settle the waters of the past, however, their initiative was churning up a maelstrom in the town. The East German authorities had prohibited any commemoration of ‘war criminals’ – meaning anyone in a wartime German uniform, from Wehrmacht stablehand to SS officer. But the end of that regime had not cleared up the difficulty of determining who was victim and who was perpetrator. Who would qualify for inclusion on the Penzlin memorial Pastor Reincke was proposing? This, he told me, was a vexing question: Should it include just members of the Marienkirche’s congregation before the war? Some had left in the 1930s to join the Nazi Party, but should they be remembered officially in death? What about refugees from bombed western cities or those from the east who had fled the advance of the Russians? In many cases their names were not recorded officially at the time they died. Could the memorial possibly include the names of ‘political’ SS from Penzlin or others who did the Nazis’ dirtiest work? If not, what about the Waffen SS, many of whom were no more than élite soldiers? What about the ordinary Wehrmacht foot soldier? Penzlin lost many men at Stalingrad and more in a single disastrous action in Romania late in the war. ‘Our starting point is to remember all who fell,’ Pastor Reincke said. ‘The issue is the wording.’

  Germany still finds it too difficult to separate the sacrifices of its old soldiers as individuals from the greater evil they helped to perpetrate. Otto Fries said he often asked himself after the war what he should have done – could have done – against the spiral of destruction gathering speed in Germany and Europe. ‘Sabotage? Opposition? And if I had been a communist, should I have tried revolution, or become a saboteur? I couldn’t answer it. I came to the conclusion I couldn’t have done anything. My place was at the front. I had to fight for my country.’ He saw himself as just one of millions of young men in uniform, yet fortunate enough to be indulging his love of flying. As the war turned against Germany he believed his duty to his country strengthened, and that breaking step with his country’s doomed march would have been to desert the Fatherland at its hour of greatest need. Only when I pressed him about the death camps did he waver from this line. ‘If I had known, I think I would have fl
own to England.’

  I said I found it curious his contribution was viewed no more sympathetically today than that of invading German soldiers, of Luftwaffe bombers, of U-boat crew who had claimed so many civilian lives and laid waste to much of Europe, sometimes going well beyond the rules of war. Surely his job of shielding German civilians and their homes from the nightly onslaught of RAF bombers was as unambiguously defensive as any act of war committed by the Third Reich. In Britain, ‘The Few’ were lauded as heroes for the same self-sacrificing devotion to defending their homeland during the Battle of Britain; the German night fighters had stuck to their similar task till the end. Fries gave a short, dry laugh and held up his palms in resignation: ‘Yes, but we lost the war – so we were the last idiots!’

  CHAPTER 17

  JOURNEYS ENDED

  ‘The Last Idiots’? I had come to know Otto-Heinrich Fries, a defeated former enemy, because he had lived a full and rewarding life, while Col Jones and the thousands who lie about him knew neither victory nor the peace they had fought to win. I reflected on this at the Heerstrasse War Cemetery one October morning in 2008, shortly before I left Berlin to return to New Zealand. Trees aflame with autumn foliage defied the sombre mood as we gathered for the burial, with full military honours, of a 21-year-old English airman shot down over Berlin in January 1944, three weeks before Col. As the Union Jack-draped coffin bearing the remains of Jack Bremner was lowered to the grave by six young RAF pallbearers, I felt a tug of recognition: Col had done the same for a friend in 1942 at the Beck Row Cemetery beside their Mildenhall airbase. He wrote later: ‘All about the day was vividly alive with sunlight and flowers. And so he joins the growing company of plain little white crosses.’ These crosses have been replaced both at Beck Row and Berlin with the distinctive, white tablets found at all Commonwealth War Cemeteries in Europe – Col’s and Bremner’s are just 10 paces apart.

  There cannot have been much left of Jack Bremner to bury 64 years after his death, but that did not seem to matter to his 89-year-old sister, nor to his former navigator, who had returned to Berlin in 2005 to begin the search that eventually unearthed the wreckage from suburban woodland. They were both at St George’s Anglican Church for the service that preceded the graveside ceremony along the road. During the service the sister had seemed a diminutive, bird-like figure, hardly visible in the front pew. As the pallbearers carried the coffin from the church she was helped into a wheelchair and turned into the aisle to follow her brother, but lost a shoe in the process. A younger, grey-haired man – the son of another crew member who died in the plane with Bremner – stepped from between the pews and helped her with a gentle familiarity that spoke of something shared. She thanked him with a beautiful smile, then tears sprang to her eyes; and in those tears the years of waiting, hoping, grieving and now, finally, release seemed distilled.

  Paths I had followed came together that morning: not just the parallels between Bremner’s violent death and Col’s, but also the importance of that particular cemetery as their final resting place. Berlin had been the ultimate target, the heart of the enemy; now it offered these young men enduring sanctuary, each ceremony of remembrance attended by German authorities with all the dignity and respect they would accord their own fallen – possibly more, from what I had seen on my travels. For me, the wartime target zones in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany were the communities I lived in while this country was my home. This terrible episode in Germany’s history and our own has left physical reminders, like Devil’s Hill, not far from the cemetery. But some of the scars become visible only rarely, such as with the farewell to Jack Bremner, which brought into full view the pain his family had carried for so long.

  Interred in Berlin, Bremner joins new company and leaves the roll of more than 20,000 airmen with no known grave, including the last member of his crew not yet accounted for. They are commemorated at Runnymede, near Windsor. In an important way, Bremner’s farewell also marked my own. It reminded me how fortunate I had been to discover in my own journey my great-uncle’s fate – a man I had come to know through his writing, a precious legacy that keeps him alive in our family’s memory. For many other families uncertainty weighs upon loss. Their journeys have not ended; their search continues.

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  Chapter1: Journey Among Ghosts

  [1] Harris is said to have uttered these words to a fellow officer while watching fires near St Paul’s, London, during the German Blitz of summer 1940, but he repeated the phrase when he took over Bomber Command.

  Chapter 2: Ditching

  [1] Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bomberkrieg 1940–1945, RM Buch und Medien Vertrieb GmbH, Munich, 2002, p.100. Essen was Germany’s second most bombed city after nearby Duisburg, which sustained 299 bombing raids.

  [2] ‘Ropey loop’ refers to a radio signal reading from the rotatable loop aerial behind the Stirling’s cockpit canopy and used to fix a position bearing. A ropey loop would give a bearing in exactly the opposite direction from the source of the signal. This 180 degrees-out bearing was also called a reciprocal bearing. Source: Jim Coman, former 149 Squadron wireless operator, in conversation with author, 17 May 2008.

  [3] CD41 Recordings , RAF Bomber Command at War 1939–45 (Vol.2): Broadcast and actuality recordings together with crew debriefs and war correspondent reports, including low level and precision strikes, compact disc: www.ltmpub.freeserve. co.uk

  [4] Air Ministry, Pilot’s and Flight Engineer’s Notes: Stirling I, III, IV &V (3rd edition), AP1660A, January 1944, p.51.

  [5] Theo Boiten, in Nachtjagd War Diaries, p.94, claims Oberleutnant Petersen rammed the Stirling’s rear turret by accident when his ME110 came in to attack too fast. Petersen never recovered from his injuries and took a non-combat role as adjutant to the night fighter ace Helmut Lent (see p.150).

  Chapter 3: Landfall

  [1] F.C. Jones, ‘Thesis on the effect on the social life of the Maoris of the missionaries and their teaching’, (121 leaves; 34 cm), Alexander Turnbull Library, call #pq572.9931 JON 1935, PA Collection 3207.

  [2] Jones, unpublished, untitled manuscript, p.9.

  Chapter 4: Home Bases

  [1]I am grateful to Joanna Caruth, of the Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, for providing or checking this historical detail.

  Chapter 5: A Lucky Enemy

  [1]The Messerschmitt 110 was technically called a BF110, owing to its manufacturing origins at the Bayerische Fabrik in Bavaria, but I have used the more common designation of ME110, which is also how both Fries and Col referred to it.

  Chapter 7: Firestorm

  [1] Figure for number of raids on Cologne cited in Friedrich, Der Brand, p.100.

  [2] Cited in Eric Taylor, Operation Millennium: ‘Bomber’ Harris’s Raid on Cologne, May 1942, Spellmount Staplehurst, 2004 (2nd edition.), p.203.

  [3] Reproduced in Taylor, inside leaf.

  [4] Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book, 1939–1945, Viking, London, 1985, p.268.

  [5] The so-called Butt Report concluded that one bomber crew in three did not even claim to have reached the target. Of those who did, only one in four crews that believed its bombs had fallen in the right place actually hit within 5 miles of the target. This summary of the report is quoted in James Taylor and Martin Davidson, Bomber Crew, Hodder &Stoughton, London, 2004.

  [6] Friedrich, Der Brand p.400.

  [7] The citation for this and a posthumous MID of Col have since been disposed of by the United Kingdom National Archives, so cannot be quoted.

  [8] Two weeks later the Lancaster in which they had flown this op, KO-N ‘Nuts’, broke up in flight and crashed in England on return from raiding Nuremberg, killing all its new crew. Bazalgette subsequently joined the Pathfinder Force and won the Victoria Cross posthumously for bombing and marking a missile-launching site in France on 4 August 1944, even though his Lancaster was so badly damaged he then had to crash land, killing h
imself and two crew too badly injured to bale out.

  [9] Goebbels’ speech is reproduced in German on the website of the German History Museum in Berlin: http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/dokumente/sportpalastrede/index.html. Translation by author.

  [10] Friedrich’s Der Brand cites Hamburg authorities for this estimate, p.194. For a detailed account of the Gomorrah campaign, see Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg: The Firestorm Raid, first published by Allen Lane, London, 1980.

  [11] Volker Hage, Zeugen der Zerstörung: Die Literaten und der Luftkrieg: Essays und Gespräche, S.Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2003, pp.136, 148. Self-translation. Reproduced with author’s permission.

  Chapter 8: On a Wing and a Prayer

  [1] Middlebrook, in The Bomber Command War Diaries, pp.290–1, puts the loss rate slightly lower – 29 of 68 that actually reached the target, from 256 aircraft dispatched.

  [2] The National Archives, United Kingdom, catalogue reference AIR/50/219.

  [3] Extract from Air Ministry Bulletin No. 8375 (26 October 1943). With thanks to RAF Museum Hendon, London.

  Chapter 9: Interceptor

  [1] McDowell’s crew was Pilot Officer John Elliott Kirkup, second pilot, age 21, RAF Volunteer Reserve, married of Essex; Sergeant John Anthony MacNish Porter, Flight Engineer, age 18, RAFVR (Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve), of Essex – one of the youngest men to die with Bomber Command; Pilot Officer Edward Laming Jackson, navigator/bomb aimer, age 21, RAFVR, of London; Flying Officer Leone Joseph Roberts, air bomber, age 21, RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force), of Saskatchewan; Sergeant Lawrence Ivory, wireless operator/gunner, age 24, of Neath, Glamorgan; Flight Sergeant Ralph Gordon Dunn, air gunner, age 22, RCAF, of Codrington Ontario; Flight Sergeant William John Whitney, air gunner RCAF.