by John Nichol
The squadron strength for the ongoing war against the V-weapon sites was boosted in January 1944 by the arrival of several new crews. Among them was one lead by an Irish-American pilot, christened Hubert Knilans but always known as Nick, and so inevitably nicknamed ‘Nicky Nylons’ by his crewmates (nylon stockings, obtainable only across the Atlantic, were a rare commodity during the war, and a welcome gift for women); his good looks and American accent made him a magnet for the English girls. He came from a farming family in Wisconsin, but in 1941 was drafted for US military service. He wanted to be a pilot, not a soldier, but knew that the USAAF required all pilots to have a college degree, so, without telling his parents, he packed a small bag and set off for Canada. He arrived there literally penniless, having spent his last ten cents on a bus ticket from Detroit to the border, but he was following such a well-trodden path that the Canadian immigration officer merely greeted him with ‘I suppose you’ve come to join the Air Force?’ and directed him to the RCAF recruiting office, where he signed on to train as a pilot.14
He soon developed a taste for the practical jokes that all aircrew seemed to share. In the depths of the bitter Canadian winter, Knilans and a friend would slip out of their barracks at night, sneak up on their comrades pacing up and down on guard duty and, at risk of being shot by trigger-happy or nervous ones, they then let fly with snowballs. The sudden shock caused some of the more nervous to drop their rifles in the snow, and one even collapsed as he whirled round to face his attacker.
After completing his flying training, he sailed for England with thousands of other recruits on board the liner Queen Elizabeth. So eager was Britain to receive these volunteers that the medical and other checks they went through were often rudimentary. One New Zealander boarding his ship passed ‘a friendly chap at the gangway asking him how he was as he passed by’.15 The ‘friendly chap’ turned out to be the medical officer giving each man boarding the ship his final medical examination!
After a bomber conversion course, Knilans joined 619 Squadron at Woodhall Spa in June 1943. He flew his first operational mission on the night of 24 July 1943 as Bomber Command launched the Battle of Hamburg, including the first-ever use of ‘Window’ – bundles of thin strips of aluminium foil now called ‘chaff’. Window was dropped in flight to disrupt enemy radar by reflecting the signal and turning their screens to blizzards of ‘snow’.
Informed in October 1943 that he was to be transferred to the USAAF, Knilans refused, insisting on remaining with 619 to complete his tour. His eagerness to fly almost cost him his life later that month when his aircraft was targeted by a night-fighter during a raid on Kassel. A stream of tracer shattered the mid-upper turret, temporarily blinding the gunner with shards of Perspex, and another burst fatally wounded the rear gunner, leaving the Lancaster defenceless. Both wings were also hit, but Knilans threw the aircraft into a vicious ‘corkscrew’ that shook off the fighter. It was a heart-stopping, gut-wrenching manoeuvre, especially for rear gunners who, facing backwards, were thrown upwards as if on an out-of-control rollercoaster as the Lancaster dived and then plunged back down as the pilot hauled on the controls to climb again.
Despite the damage to his aircraft, the loss of his gunners, and damage to one engine, Knilans insisted on pressing on to bomb the target, before sending some of his crew back to help the wounded gunner. ‘I knew that in an infantry attack, you could not stop to help a fallen comrade,’ he said. ‘You had to complete your charge first. Bomber Command called it “Press on, regardless”.’
Despite damage to his undercarriage, including a flat tyre on the port side, Knilans eventually made a safe landing back at Woodhall Spa, using brakes, throttles, rudders and stick as he battled to keep the aircraft on the runway. He then helped the ambulance crew to remove the blood-soaked body of his rear gunner from the rear turret. He had almost been cut in half by the cannon shells that killed him. The squadron doctor issued Knilans with two heavy-duty sleeping pills so that his sleep would not be disturbed by those horrific memories, but he gave them instead to the WAAF transport driver, a good friend of the dead gunner, who was overcome with grief and unable to drive.
Awarded the DSO for his courage, Knilans wore that medal ribbon on his uniform, but not the other British, Canadian and American medals to which he was entitled. ‘I thought it would antagonise others on the same squadron,’ he said, ‘or confirm their prejudices about bragging Yanks.’
Although he had pressed on to the target on that occasion, on another, while flying through a ‘box barrage’ from heavy anti-aircraft gun batteries over Berlin, with flak bursting all around them and fragments from near-misses rattling against the fuselage, his bomb-aimer told him, ‘Sorry Skip, the flare’s dropped into the clouds. We’ll have to go round again.’
‘You can still see the lousy flare,’ Knilans angrily replied. ‘Now drop the bombs!’ The bomb-aimer got the message, ‘saw’ the flare and dropped the bombs, and they then ‘departed in haste’.
Knilans was a popular figure on his squadron, even though he had made a deliberate decision not to become too closely involved with his crewmates. ‘I would have liked to have met their families, but I decided against it. If the crew members became too close to me, it would interfere with my life or death decisions concerning them. A kind welcome by their families would add to my mental burden. It could lead to my crew thinking of me as unfriendly, but it could lead to their lives being saved too.’
By January 1944, Knilans had decided:
I did not want to go on bombing civilian populations. There were few front-line soldiers and the flak-battery operators were women, young boys and old men. The cities were filled with workers, their wives and children … This type of bombing had weakened my reliance on my original ideal of restoring happiness to the children of Europe. Here I was going out and killing many of them on each bombing raid … It was an evil deed to drop bombs on them, I thought. It was a necessary evil, though, to overcome the greater evil of Nazism and Fascism.
However, keen to remain on ops, he volunteered for 617 Squadron, which instead bombed ‘only single factories, submarine pens and other military targets’, and persuaded his crew to join with him. Two other squadron leaders promptly put the wind up some of them by telling them that 617 was ‘a low-level flying suicide squadron’, but Knilans merely shrugged and told them that he wasn’t concerned about that, since ‘nobody had managed to live long enough to finish a tour’ on their present squadron either.
The RAF regarded a loss of around 5 per cent of the aircrews on each combat trip as acceptable and sustainable. After a quick mental calculation, Nick Knilans had ‘figured it out that by the end of a first tour of thirty trips, it would mean 150 per cent of the crews would be lost. Suicide or slow death, it did not make much difference at that stage of the war.’
Two other pilots and their crews from 619 Squadron, Bob Knights and Mac Hamilton, followed his lead, telling him that ‘they did not like bombing cities indiscriminately either’. It was a short move over to 617 Squadron, as it was in the process of transferring to Woodhall Spa, ensuring that Knilans could continue to enjoy the comforts of the Petwood Hotel Officers’ Mess: ‘the best damn foxhole I would ever find for shelter’.
Knilans and his crew were allocated Lancaster R-Roger as their regular aircraft while on 617 Squadron. The ground crew thought it should be called ‘The Jolly Roger’ and wanted to paint a scantily dressed pirate girl ‘wearing a skull and cross bones on her hat’, but Knilans refused. ‘I did not want a scantily clad girl or a humorous name painted on the aircraft assigned to me. This flying into combat night after night, to me, was not very funny. It was a cold-blooded battle to kill or be killed.’
Knilans did not lack a sense of humour, however, and ‘carried away one day with the exhilaration of flying at treetop level at 200 mph’, he could not resist buzzing the Petwood Hotel. ‘We roared over the roof two feet above the tiles. It must have shook from end to end.’ It was teatime and a WAAF was just car
rying a tray of tea and cakes to the Station Commander’s table. ‘The sudden thunderous roar and rattle caused her to throw the tray into the air. It crashed beside the Group Captain, my Commanding Officer. He was not amused. Wingco Cheshire told me later that he had quite a time keeping me from being court-martialled by my irate CO.’
* * *
On Boxing Day 1943 the last great battle of the sea war ended with the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst, but in terms of the final outcome of the war, an event had taken place a month earlier that, though known to only a handful of people at the time, was to prove far more decisive. At the Tehran Conference of 28 November, Roosevelt and Churchill had at last agreed to meet Stalin’s constant demands that a second front should be opened in the land war against Germany, and the invasion of France, code-named Operation Overlord, was set to begin in six months’ time, in June 1944.
617 Squadron’s transfer to their new home, Woodhall Spa, took place in early January 1944. A former out-station of RAF Coningsby, it was now a permanent base in its own right for 617’s crews and their thirty-four Lancasters. If the new base’s prefab buildings were less solid than the brick-built facilities at Scampton and Coningsby, their new airfield at least had three concrete runways and thirty-six heavy-bomber hard-standings, with three hangars, a bomb dump on the northern edge of the airfield and the control tower on the south-eastern side. The roads crossing the Lincolnshire flatlands around the base were all but deserted – petrol was strictly rationed and few had any to spare – but the skies overhead were always busy with aircraft, black as rooks against the sky, though, unlike rooks, the aircraft usually left their roosts at sunset and returned to them at dawn.
Officers based at Woodhall Spa were billeted in some style in the Petwood Hotel, originally a furniture magnate’s mansion and built in a half-timbered mock-Tudor style with a massive oak front door, windows with leaded lights and acres of oak panelling. The grounds included majestic elms, rhododendron-lined avenues, manicured lawns, sunken gardens and a magnificent lily pond. There was also an outdoor swimming pool, tennis courts, a golf course, and even a cinema – The Kinema in the Woods, or ‘The Flicks in the Sticks’ as it was christened by 617’s irreverent crews – in a converted sports pavilion on the far side of the Petwood’s grounds. The most highly prized – and highly priced – seats were the front six rows, where you sat in deckchairs instead of conventional cinema seats. The Petwood’s beautiful grounds and timeless feel could almost have made the aircrews forget the war altogether, had ugly reality not intruded so often. As Nick Knilans remarked, ‘One day I would be strolling about in this idyllic setting with a friend and the next day he would be dead.’
Inside the hotel there was a high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room adapted for use as a bar, a billiard room and two lounge areas with roaring log fires, though other parts of the building were sealed off and the most valuable paintings and furniture removed – a wise precaution given the boisterous nature of most off-duty aircrews’ recreations.
The Petwood provided the aircrew with a comfortable base to escape the rigours of the war – a luxury the men of Bomber Command held dear. On a visit to one bomber base, the great American correspondent Martha Gellhorn described their preparations for an approaching operation:
A few talked, their voices rarely rising above a murmur, but most remained silent, withdrawing into themselves, writing letters, reading pulp novels, or staring into space. Though they were probably reading detective stories or any of the much-used third-rate books that are in their library, they seem to be studying. Because if you read hard enough, you can get away from yourself and everyone else and from thinking about the night ahead.16
Cheshire himself almost became the squadron’s first casualty at Woodhall Spa while carrying out an air test on 13 January 1944. Just after take-off, he flew into a dense flock of plovers and hit several of the birds. One smashed through the cockpit windscreen, narrowly missing Cheshire, while another struck and injured the flight engineer who was the only other person on board. Cheshire made a low-level circuit and managed to land his damaged aircraft safely. 617 Squadron mythology claims that at least twenty plovers were on the menu at the Petwood Hotel that night!17
The thin Perspex of the canopy and the bomb-aimer’s ‘fish-bowl’ in the nose were very vulnerable. ‘The last thing you want as you are tearing down the runway at a hundred-plus and about to lift off is a flaming bird exploding through the canopy; for one thing it makes a hell of a bang, and sudden loud noises are not popular in an aircraft, especially in the middle of a take-off.’ If they did hit a bird, the bomb-aimer and the flight engineer were ‘liable to get a faceful of jagged bits of Perspex and a filthy mess of blood, guts and feathers to clear up’, said Gunner Chan Chandler.18 Bird-strikes were a serious problem and at Scampton, Coningsby and Woodhall Spa there were scarecrows, bird-scarers and regular shooting parties with half a dozen shotgun-toting aircrew touring the perimeter of the base in a van and shooting every bird they saw. ‘There were no rules about it being unsporting to shoot sitting birds – slaughter was the order of the day, and slaughter it was.’19
Members of 617 Squadron also relieved the boredom of noflying days with games and pranks that showcased their endless – if pointless – ingenuity. One much-prized skill was the ability to put a postage stamp, sticky side up, on top of a two-shilling piece and then flip the coin so that the stamp finished up stuck to the ceiling. Those with a good sense of balance could attempt to do a hand-stand, balance on their head, and in that position drink a pint of beer without spilling a drop. A trick with an even higher tariff required them to stand upright with a full pint on their forehead, slowly recline until they were flat on the floor and then get back to their feet, once more without spilling a drop of beer.
Team games included Mess Rugby, played with a stuffed forage cap for a ball and armchairs as additional opponents to be avoided while sprinting across the Mess. There was also the ascent of ‘Mount Everest’, which involved piling chairs one on top of each other with ‘the odd bod perched in them’. The ‘mountaineer’ would then climb the heap bare-footed and clutching a plateful of green jelly. When he reached the top of the stack, he placed his bare feet one at a time firmly in the jelly, and then, holding himself upside down, left the imprints of his bare feet on the ceiling. Once the stack of chairs had been removed, newcomers were left to ponder how on earth someone had managed to walk across the ceiling 15 feet above the floor.
Such mountaineering exploits did not always end well. One Canadian pilot on another squadron, Tommy Thompson, covered his bare foot with black ink, but, having successfully made his footprint on the ceiling, lost his balance, fell and broke his leg. He ‘played the role of wounded hero quite well’ in the Boston and Lincoln pubs, and never told those who bought him a drink why he was on crutches.
The Boston pubs were always packed with aircrew from the surrounding RAF bases, and for those without cars, the scramble to get aboard the last buses that all left from the Market Place at 10.15 every night was, said one airman, ‘a sight which had to be seen to be believed’. Most of them just drank beer, and it was ‘rather innocuous’ because, by government decree, beer was no more than 2 per cent alcohol – less than half pre-war strength – and, says Larry Curtis, ‘you had to drink an awful lot of it before you got merry.’ There were regular sessions in the Mess, but the aircrew also ‘really needed a place away from the station where we could go to forget about the war for a while; we had a lot to be grateful for in the English pub,’ Curtis says.20
While the officers were enjoying a life of relative luxury at the Petwood Hotel, the NCOs found they had been allocated some rather less salubrious accommodation: a row of Nissen huts and wooden huts erected just outside the airfield’s perimeter fence at the side of the B1192 road. Roofed with corrugated iron, they were bone-chillingly cold in winter. One of the NCOs recalled, ‘One of the things we had to be careful about, living in Nissen huts in England in the winter, was that
if you put your hand against the wall or the roof, it stuck there [because it froze to the metal]. I’ve seen a few hands with palms left behind.’21 There was one other peril for crewmen living in the Nissen huts: the trees around them were home to a colony of woodpeckers that drove them mad and disturbed their sleep after night ops with their endless, dawn-to-dusk drilling into the trees with their beaks.
Amidst the camaraderie, the dangers and the tedium of RAF life, the war ground on, and as the Christmas festivities of 1943 faded from their memories, the men of 617 Squadron began to wonder just how long the fight would last.
CHAPTER 4
Death or Glory
A raid by 617 Squadron on a V-1 site in the Pas de Calais on 22 January 1944 – the same day that the Battle of Anzio was launched in Italy – marked another decisive moment in the evolution of the squadron. Leonard Cheshire tried to mark the target from 7,000 feet, but his bomb-aimer, Keith ‘Aspro’ Astbury – a flamboyant and spectacularly foul-mouthed Australian who was one of the most cherished characters on the squadron – was unsighted by flares bursting ahead of them at the crucial moment and the markers overshot the target.
Mick Martin had previously told Cheshire that he could ‘hit a target as small as a clump of seaweed by using his Lancaster as a dive bomber without using the bombsight’. According to another veteran of 617, Cheshire had rubbished the idea at the time, but Martin now set out to prove it. Disobeying his orders, instead of dropping his spot-fire markers from height, he dived down and placed them with precision from 400 feet instead.1 Subsequent reconnaissance photography showed substantial damage to the site, and the unusually accurate Main Force bombing seemed to justify Martin’s claims about the effectiveness of low-level marking.
With the successes they were now achieving, 617 Squadron was no longer being seen as ‘the suicide squadron’. They were hitting more targets, losing fewer aircraft, and having considerably more effect than much of Main Force. While the bulk of Bomber Command continued with the policy of laying waste to whole cities, 617 was specialising in the precision bombing of individual targets, a task requiring new techniques and new equipment to produce the spectacularly accurate navigation and weapon aiming that would be required.