by John Nichol
The first two major ops by 617 Squadron had therefore cost the lives of fourteen crews. The death rate on the Dortmund–Ems Canal op was equivalent to that of the triumphantly received Dams raid, and as Johnny Johnson remarked, ‘In many ways it was not dissimilar to the Dams, apart from those very heavy defences and the difficulty of getting at the target. That was the killer.’16 Yet while the Dams raid had been hailed as one of the greatest successes of the war, the failure to destroy the target this time caused Dortmund–Ems to be regarded as an unmitigated disaster. The margins between great success and total failure were proving to be vanishingly small.
Johnny Johnson was ill and had played no part in the raid, but hearing about the losses, he was desperate to find out if his pilot, Joe McCarthy, and the rest of his usual crew had been involved. ‘It was a worrying time, these men were my family,’ he says, but to his great relief he found that they had not taken part in the raid, with both McCarthy and Les Munro temporarily grounded on the orders of the Medical Officer.
The squadron’s relative inactivity since the Dams raid and the attendant ‘one op’ gibes from other squadrons may have led to the target and the method of attacking it being hastily chosen, with too little thought about the potential pitfalls, and as successor to the now legendary Guy Gibson, George Holden may also have been eager to win his own spurs. ‘There was a sense that we had to get back on ops,’ Johnny Johnson now says. ‘Squadron Leader Holden wanted to do it to keep the reputation of the squadron and its role in special operations. Maybe the accolades we had received because of the Dams op meant we had to get on and do more, be more successful. But those accolades were a hindrance here.’17
Only six crews – including those of Mick Martin, Dave Shannon, Les Munro and Joe McCarthy, who were veterans of the Dams raids – now remained on the squadron. Desperate to atone for the failures, Martin volunteered to return to the target the following night, flying solo to complete the job, but he was overruled by his superiors and, apart from an abortive attempt to bomb the Anthéor railway viaduct in southern France the following night, the Dortmund–Ems Canal raid proved to be 617 Squadron’s last for almost two months.
The heavy losses they had suffered at the canal were proof that their signature operations – low-level, night-time, precision-bombing raids – were no longer viable. They had been lucky at the dams, albeit still with the loss of almost half their force. At the Dortmund–Ems Canal their luck had run out. ‘It was a big blow to the squadron,’ one crewman says. ‘We lost so many that night that it seemed to affect the thinking of the powers that be. It was a very traumatic experience.’18
There were to be no more low-level attacks. From now on 617 Squadron would operate at high level, using a new tachometric precision bombsight, the SABS (Stabilised Automatic Bomb Sight), to ensure accuracy. It was one of the world’s first computerised bombsights and a complex, hand-built piece of equipment, consisting of a mechanical computer mounted to the left of the bomb-aimer and a stabilised sighting head fitted with an optical graticule. The sight was connected to a Bombing Direction Indicator (BDI) mounted on the pilot’s instrument panel, which indicated the amount of left or right turn required to bring the sight to bear on the target. Once the sight had been programmed with the necessary data – the aircraft’s speed and altitude, and the wind-speed and direction – the bomb-aimer had only to keep the target centred in the graticule and the sight itself would then automatically release the bomb at the right moment.
However, while they could achieve impressive accuracy with the sight, and attacking from height made them less vulnerable to flak, it also made them much more vulnerable to German night-fighters, particularly when attacked from below, the Lancaster’s blindspot. In the early stages of the war, anti-aircraft guns had claimed far more victims than fighters, but that was quickly reversed and by 1943, Bomber Command losses to night-fighters were twice those caused by flak.
German night-fighter pilot Peter Spoden – these days a great-grandfather living in a care home with his wife – brought down twenty-four four-engine British bombers during the war, and he cries as he reflects on the deaths of the crews inside them, young men of his own age. The aircraft he shot down never even knew he was there: he approached from behind and below them, flew 50 or 60 feet underneath their fuselage and unleashed the two upward-firing guns the German pilots called Schräge Musik. (Translating literally as ‘slanting music’, Schräge Musik was their slang term for jazz.) Spoden recalls one night where he was talked in by his radio operator and suddenly saw ‘this black shadow above me … in ten minutes I shot down three Lancasters – I was completely out of my mind.’19 However, the firing wasn’t all one way. One Lancaster gunner has vivid memories of shooting down a fighter at close quarters: ‘I could see my bullets hitting him. I couldn’t miss him – not at that range.’20
617 Squadron’s shocking rate of losses had led to their sarcastic nickname ‘The One Op Squadron’ being replaced with a new one, ‘The Suicide Squadron’, and the deaths of so many crewmates dealt what could easily have been a terminal blow to morale. ‘Those losses had a big effect, there was a sense of distress and shock, and possibly even dissatisfaction that we were asked to do something which should never have been attempted,’ Johnny Johnson says. But although morale was inevitably affected in the short term, confidence soon recovered. ‘Morale slumped because they were rather staggering losses,’ Larry Curtis adds, ‘but one did tend to throw these things off very quickly. Going from low level to high level made all the difference; losses were very slight after that.’21
* * *
While their comrades were trying to come to terms with the disaster, two of the survivors of Les Knight’s crash had been captured, but the remaining five, including Sidney Hobday and Fred Sutherland, were on the ground in the Occupied Netherlands, trying to evade the Nazis. They were separated from each other, and the knowledge that he was now alone in the heart of enemy territory, facing capture or perhaps even death if he were found, almost paralysed Hobday at first. However, realising that the greatest danger of discovery lay in remaining close to the wreckage of his downed aircraft, he climbed down from the tree he had landed in and set off south, away from the burning Lancaster.
He walked through dew-soaked meadows and along a canal bank, carrying on until it started to get light, when he hid in a small wood. However, his feet were soaked, and, sitting on the wet grass, he began to feel very cold. ‘Not wishing to get pneumonia,’ he began walking again, but as he approached a metalled road, the sound of galloping hoofs terrified him and he dived behind the nearest hedgerow, imagining ‘a couple of dozen mounted Jerries looking for me’. When he risked peering out, he saw that the ‘hoof-beats’ were actually the noise made by some Dutch children’s wooden clogs as they ran along the road to school. As he waited for them to pass, he glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty in the morning. ‘Twelve hours before, I had been strumming the piano in the Mess.’22
Before setting out along the road, he took off his brevet and his other RAF markings, trying to make his battledress look as civilian as possible. Hobday knew that his name and those of his comrades decorated after the Dams raid had been published in the English newspapers, and as a result they had all been put on a Nazi blacklist. He knew that if he was taken prisoner, he was unlikely to remain alive for long.
He had not walked far when he saw two farmworkers cycling towards him. He bent down, pretending to tie his laces, but they stopped. Not speaking Dutch, he couldn’t understand them, but after a few moments of gut-gnawing indecision, he decided to risk telling them who we was. He said ‘RAF’ several times without any sign of recognition from them, and then began flapping his arms about to mimic flying. They now seemed to understand and, having looked carefully up and down the road, gave him half their food, ‘black bread with some queer stuff in it which I could not stomach’. He gave them a couple of cigarettes in return from the packs he always carried on ops, in case of just such an eventuality
.
Heartened by their friendliness and realising the impossibility of crossing Europe alone and unaided, Hobday decided to seek more help from civilians where he could, hoping they would put him in touch with the Dutch Resistance. After a few more hours of walking he tried to hitch a ride in a little cart, but the driver shook his head, indicating by sign language that the Germans would slit his throat if they caught him. However, he gave Hobday some more black bread before driving off.
A little further down the road, he saw the same cart driver in urgent conversation with a woman, who then passed Hobday on her bicycle a couple of times, studying him carefully without speaking. Once more he was left fearing betrayal to the Nazis, but he kept walking and was then overtaken by some young men, who spoke to him in ‘slow schoolboy English’. They gave him some apples and a tall man then brought him a civilian suit. It would have ‘fitted a man five inches taller than myself,’ Hobday said, but he changed into it and the Dutchmen took his RAF uniform away. They also insisted on shaving off his moustache, saying it made him look ‘too English’.
Hobday was then told to make his way alone to a railway station 10 miles away, as it was too dangerous for them to accompany him. By the time he arrived, he was close to exhaustion. He hadn’t slept for thirty hours and had walked for another twelve with almost no rest. The tall man was waiting for him and gave him a train ticket to a town 100 kilometres away with a list of the times of the trains he had to catch. He also gave him a note in Dutch that said: ‘This man is deaf and dumb. Please help him.’
The journey tested Hobday’s nerves to breaking point. He first almost blundered into a carriage reserved for Wehrmacht troops and then, when he found an empty carriage, a ‘German Luftwaffe man and his girl’ got in and sat next to him. Luckily they were more interested in each other than the strange man sharing the compartment, and with the aid of his ‘deaf and dumb’ note, Hobday made it safely to his destination, where a young member of the Dutch Resistance met him. Having questioned Hobday searchingly to make sure he was not a German spy, he led him out of town to a place where eight members of the Resistance were in hiding, living in a crude hut deep in the heart of dense woodland. They had been carrying out minor acts of sabotage and raiding German stores, assembling ‘quite a collection’ of firearms, explosives, uniforms, blank visas and identity cards.
Twenty-four hours later, Hobday was reunited with Fred Sutherland, who had also managed to make contact with the Resistance. Fred had walked a few miles from the Lancaster’s crash site when, realising that ‘walking all the way to the south of Europe was never going to work’, he hid behind a barn and then jumped out as a girl about his own age was cycling towards him. ‘She nearly jumped out of her skin!’ he says. ‘She couldn’t speak any English so I tried to communicate with sign language that the Germans would cut my throat if they caught me.’ She took him to a boy who could speak a few words of English, and he contacted the Resistance. ‘After the war, I was told that this girl had actually been dating a German soldier!’ Sutherland says. ‘So I guess I was lucky because she didn’t tell anyone.’
Fred Sutherland
Sutherland and Hobday were comfortable enough living in the hut, sleeping on stolen German blankets and straw beds. Their food was largely potatoes, although one day a Dutchman caught some tiny eels in a nearby canal. The Resistance had begun making arrangements for the two RAF men to be returned to England via France and Spain, but the long chain of helpers was vulnerable to infiltration or arrest by the Nazis, and it proved a lengthy and fear-ridden process. Twice they were almost discovered, once when German troops began holding infantry manoeuvres in the woods, and the other when they escaped a Gestapo raid on the hut by the skin of their teeth.
After three weeks, frantic to contact his wife, who he knew would believe that he had been killed, Hobday had to be prevented from setting off for Spain on his own, but a week later arrangements were finally in place. The night before their departure, their hosts staged a farewell party for them, fuelled by a bottle of gin and some beer. The next day they set off, first travelling to Rotterdam, escorted by a woman dressed as a nurse.
They then travelled to Paris by train, armed with new fake identity papers showing that they were labourers for the Todt Organisation working on an aerodrome near Marseille. (As the Third Reich’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Fritz Todt ran the entire German construction industry. His Organisation Todt built the West Wall that guarded the coast of German-occupied Europe, as well as roads and other large-scale engineering projects in occupied Europe.) They went via Brussels and had ‘some shaky moments’ at the two frontiers, surviving a close examination of their fake identity papers at a German checkpoint. When the German officer held them up to the light for a better look, Sutherland’s hands were shaking so much that he had to ball his fists and brace his elbows against his side to hide them. ‘My heart was pounding and I was really scared,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to be nonchalant when you are facing your enemy.’ However, with the help of their Dutch escorts, who, at considerable risk to their own lives, kept up a stream of distracting conversation with the German frontier guards, the fake papers passed scrutiny.
‘I can’t begin to describe the courage of the people who helped us in Holland and France,’ Sutherland says. ‘They took us into their homes, fed us and cared for us at tremendous risk to themselves and their families. The Germans had infiltrated the Underground and people did not know who they could trust, and yet still they helped us, even knowing that, while we would likely be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, they and their families would be shot.’
They remained in Paris for nearly a fortnight, staying in the tiny flat of an elderly French lady, at huge risk to herself, and eventually they were taken to a clearing house for escaping aircrew and PoWs. There they were given yet more new papers and then set off in small groups for the journey to the Pyrenees.
When they arrived at Pau, they got themselves French-style berets and then took a small train through ‘the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen’ to Sainte-Marie and were driven on from there in a car powered by gas made from charcoal. At the foot of the Pyrenees they lodged overnight in a barn where other escapers were already waiting and began the climb of the mountains the next day. Apart from their guide and his dog, there were ten escapers: three Americans, three Frenchmen, a Dutchman, an Australian, the Canadian Sutherland and Hobday, the only Briton.
Following weeks in hiding, on a very poor diet and with little chance of exercise, Hobday was very unfit. Even worse, after climbing for six hours over the rocky paths, his shoes fell apart. Fortunately the guide had a spare pair, though they were too small and ‘hurt like hell’. They climbed all night, a perilous ascent with no light to guide them, following narrow, twisting paths with the mountainside rising sheer above them on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Only the thought of the fate that awaited them if they were found by the Nazis spurred them on. They had little rest and even less food, and suffered a frustrating and frightening delay when a shepherd, recruited by the guide to show them a short cut to the Spanish side of the mountains, became completely lost and left them in driving rain 7,000 feet up on the mountainside, while he tried to discover where they were.
They had started climbing the mountains at seven o’clock on Wednesday evening and did not reach the Spanish side until the Saturday morning. Having already passed through the Netherlands and right across France, in constant fear of discovery by the Gestapo, they had then dragged themselves right over the Pyrenees. Their epic escape was ‘the toughest thing I’ve ever done’, Sutherland says. Completely spent, they rested for the remainder of that morning and swallowed some food and wine, though it ‘came up as fast as it went down’.
In the afternoon they walked down to the nearest village, Orbaizeta. By then Hobday was so stiff he could hardly walk, and his companions were little better. Although Spain was ruled by Franco’s fascist regime, it was professedly neutral in the war, but there was a
tense atmosphere as they encountered the Spanish carabineros for the first time. However, they treated the escapers well enough, and they remained in the ‘dirty little village’ until the Monday, though Hobday had to sell his watch to pay for food for Sutherland and himself. The shop where they ate was ‘a general store, very much like the Wild West saloons of the old cowboy films, complete with liquor, shepherds, singing and a bit of good-natured scrapping. On the Sunday they all came in with their week’s money and proceeded to get rid of it on booze.’ The place was filthy and there were pigs and chickens wandering everywhere, indoors and out.
The escapees were then taken to Pamplona, where they were met by the Red Cross, who escorted them to Madrid, a journey that took a further fortnight. There staff at the British Embassy gave them a train ticket to Gibraltar, where, to their enormous relief, they were at last back on British soil. Hobday’s first action was to cable his wife to tell her he was alive. They were flown home a few days later, on 6 December 1943, almost three months after they had been shot down.
If Hobday needed any reminder of how fortunate they had been to come through that marathon journey unscathed, the fate of a Dutchman he had befriended provided it. He attempted to cross the Pyrenees a week after Hobday but was caught in a snowstorm and got lost. Suffering from frostbite, he was captured by a German frontier guard and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.23