by John Nichol
As a boy, Knilans had watched the local Ku Klux Klan, including one of his uncles, assembling around their burning cross in the park facing his house. ‘They were mostly anti-Catholic,’ he said, ‘as there weren’t any Negroes to harass. By the light of the burning cross, my brother, some friends and I would shoot stones at the Klansmen with our slingshots. My uncle was the tallest and the favourite target.’ He complained to Knilans’ father, but the boy was not punished and his father’s only comment was to tell him that ‘we should be sure and hit every Klansman at least once!’
With Knilans’ belief in distant ideals eroded, the second layer of defences against combat fatigue identified by psychiatrists was to focus on a short-term objective, like the completion of a tour of duty. However, it was hard for any aircrew to focus on this when they knew that the odds of survival were stacked against them. One unpublished intelligence report gave a pilot a 10 per cent chance of completing two tours of combat flights, or, as Knilans observed, to put it another way, there was a 90 per cent chance of getting killed. ‘I could keep my conscious mind from dwelling on the morbid thought. It must have been registering daily in my subconsciousness, though. So many men had been killed flying out of Woodhall Spa that I was losing track of them. I would go to a friend’s room for a chat, only to recall on the way that he had been shot down.’ Knilans felt that his self-confidence was ‘weakening progressively … I did not want to endanger my crew. I did want to get them safely through their second tour. Then they would be out of the combat part of the war.’ Knilans did not know it at the time, but he was testing his luck, and his mind, to the extreme.
* * *
Ten days after D-Day, on 14 June 1944, 617 Squadron were tasked with leading a massive force of bombers in attacks on the hardened concrete U-boat pens at Le Havre, where German E-boats – high-speed surface craft capable of combat speeds in excess of 40 miles an hour – were sheltering. Armed with cannon and torpedoes, and operating under cover of darkness, the E-boats had already caused substantial losses to Allied shipping in the Channel, particularly the transport craft carrying munitions and supplies in support of the invasion.
Leonard Cheshire, in a Mosquito, dived down from 3,000 feet to 700 feet before releasing his red target markers. As he did so, he was ‘completely encased in hundreds of rounds of light flak shells’ but ‘escaped one more time’. Twenty-two Lancasters of 617 Squadron followed him in, bombing with Tallboys, and by the end of the raid the pens and harbour were littered with wrecked E-boats, only one of them now fit to put to sea.
Despite the dangers, some aircrew revelled in the opportunity to see action even if they were not required to take part. Nick Knilans’ Lancaster was also hit by heavy flak, probably causing another 617 Squadron pilot, Jimmy Castagnola, to regret having come with him as a passenger, though in the event the only casualty was the mid-upper gunner, who was hit in the leg. Castagnola had volunteered to ‘come along for the ride’ even though it would not count towards his total of ops. He, and ‘many other 617 types,’ Knilans said, ‘liked to go along just for the excitement of combat … These off-duty passengers liked the feeling of no responsibilities and the thrill of the danger encountered.’
The dangers were very real. The following night, the squadron was airborne again, this time targeting the E-boat pens at Boulogne. They had taken off in perfect weather and flew over the Channel through ‘gin-clear skies’, but as they approached the French coast they found cloud obscuring the target.5 Squadron Leader Les Munro, leading the Lancaster formation, decided that the weather conditions made an accurate attack impossible and signalled a return to base.
In the event, Wing Commander Cheshire, flying a Mosquito, descended through the cloud and found the skies clear below 8,000 feet, the absolute minimum height for the Tallboys to achieve sufficient terminal velocity to penetrate the concrete structures. Cheshire overruled the order to return to base and the Lancasters turned back towards the target.
As Nick Knilans’ Lancaster was completing his bomb-run, James Castagnola, again flying ‘second dickey’, ‘just for fun’, shouted, ‘Look up, Nicky!’ As Knilans did so, he saw ‘a dozen thousand-pound bombs coming at us. Another squadron’s Lancaster had dumped their bombs down through the clouds. I made a very steep diving turn to port. Roy, in the rear turret, claimed he could have patted one of the bombs as it hurtled past his turret.’
All the bombs missed and Knilans made it back to base unscathed, but ‘Mac’ Hamilton was lucky to make it back at all after being riddled by a barrage of flak as he began his bomb-run. ‘The first shot hit us – the only reason I’m here to say this is because it went off under the Tallboy [which blocked most of the shrapnel], but it damaged the hydraulics.’ The next burst damaged the bomb doors, though without hydraulics they couldn’t have closed them anyway. The next one hit the starboard wing, and the starboard landing gear came down, causing such drag from the slipstream that it pulled the aircraft to the right. The next shot punched a tennis-ball-sized hole straight through the starboard middle tank and they lost 400 gallons of high-octane fuel, which sprayed out all over the rear gunner, the vapour almost incapacitating him.6
By this time the flak was getting even heavier and Hamilton started to turn off, but the bomb-aimer, Roly Duck, shouted, ‘Hold it Mac, I want a picture!’ so they carried on towards the target. ‘It felt like a fortnight,’ Hamilton said, ‘but was only about fourteen seconds.’ Just as he heard the bomb-aimer’s exultant shout of ‘We’ve hit it!’ another flak burst tore the aircraft’s nose off.7
The force of the blast badly wounded Roly Duck, and blew him back through his compartment and halfway up the steps to the cockpit. The whole of the glass nose of the cockpit had disappeared and the ferocious wind blew all the navigator’s maps and papers and ‘a load of Window all over the place’. The drag on the aircraft from the lowered landing gear and the hole in the nose was also causing them to lose height steadily. Crossing back over the Channel, they were down to about 3,000 feet and expecting to ditch somewhere between Boulogne and Folkestone.
The crew had no intercom and could communicate only by shouting or passing scribbled notes to each other. Two of them were trying to treat Roly Duck’s wounds as he lay on the floor of the cockpit. Still in shock, the gaping wound to his leg felt to Duck ‘like being hit on the back of the legs with a football on a cold day. My legs were numb.’
As his crewmate Flight Sergeant Leonard Rooke cut away Duck’s trousers to examine the wound, Duck said, ‘What the hell is wrong?’
‘Well,’ Rooke said, ‘you’ve got a hole in the front of your leg and an even bigger bugger in the back.’ He later confided to Mac Hamilton, ‘I don’t know what he’s making such a fuss about. I could only find one hole, my finger only goes in that far,’ pointing three inches from the end of his forefinger!8
Duck felt a savage stab of pain as ‘some bloody fool’ – his crewmate Rooke – tried to inject him with morphine, and he kicked out. His flailing legs hit the throttle quadrant, causing both starboard engines to cut out and throwing the aircraft into an immediate steep dive. Knocking Duck’s feet out of the way, Hamilton managed to regain control and restart the engines. ‘Through gritted teeth, Duck told Rooke not to bother with the morphine.’9
As Hamilton flew on, out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed what at first he thought were fighters overtaking them ‘at fantastic speed’, even though one of them appeared to be on fire. Only later did he realise that he had just had his first sight of one of Nazi Germany’s terror weapons: the V-1 flying bomb.
Desperately short of fuel, he then got a message from West Malling telling him to land there, but warning him that flares were being put down to guide him to a landing on the grass 100 yards north of the main runway, leaving it clear for the fighters based there which were chasing the flying bombs.
Hamilton’s crew only managed to lower the port undercarriage by using the emergency air bottle to power it, and there was no way of knowing if it was locke
d down or not. They tried to use the rest of the air to lower the flaps, but it ran out when they had only been lowered halfway. Nonetheless, after ordering the crew to crash positions, Hamilton managed to make a safe landing on the grass. When he’d pulled to a halt, someone came to the front of the aircraft, looked up through the gaping hole in the nose and said, ‘God, how did you get this thing back?’10
A medical team brought Roly Duck out of the aircraft on a stretcher. He was conscious but had lost a lot of blood, and his flying suit was soaked in it from chest to knees. The doctor who examined him took one look and cheerily said, ‘Christ, I’ve never seen so much blood. Are you sure you haven’t been hit in the balls, old man?’ Surgeons later removed twenty-seven pieces of flak from him – a shortage of anaesthetic caused him to regain consciousness halfway through the operation – and presented them to him in a NAAFI mug as souvenirs.
The unfortunate Duck then developed gangrene in both legs. Doctors were planning to amputate, but then agreed for him to be transferred to the RAF hospital at Rauceby, near RAF Cranwell, in the hope that his legs might be saved by treatment there. Rauceby housed a specialist unit, where a group of surgeons including members of Archibald McIndoe’s ‘Guinea Pig Club’ pioneered techniques to rebuild the shattered bodies and faces of crash and burn victims.
Mac Hamilton, thinking he would be doing his friend a favour, flew Roly Duck to Rauceby in a Lancaster and was focused on performing the softest of landings, determined not to cause his bomb-aimer any further discomfort. He was making a perfect landing when he felt a jolt and saw that the port main wheel had separated from the undercarriage and was rolling down the runway ahead of them. He fought to hold the aircraft upright as long as possible, but, inevitably, the wing dug into the ground, slewing the aircraft around, and fire broke out in both port engines.
The crew’s exit from the burning aircraft was a model of speed and efficiency, and it was only when all of them were standing on the runway that they remembered the badly injured Roly Duck was still inside, strapped to his stretcher in the rear of the fuselage. Along with the shaken WAAF who had been escorting him, he was safely rescued from the aircraft and taken to the RAF hospital, where the leading orthopaedic surgeon, George Braithwaite, operated and saved both legs, albeit with the aid of bone grafts that left him with a permanent limp.
Reconnaissance photography after the attacks on Le Havre and Boulogne showed that, despite the difficulties with weather and the air defences, the raids had been outstanding successes. Several Tallboys had penetrated the concrete roofs of the pens at both sites, wreaking havoc among the E-boats berthed there. An estimated total of 130 E-boats had been destroyed, with an incalculable saving of Allied shipping and lives as a result.
CHAPTER 8
Terror Weapons
On 13 June 1944 the first pulse-jet-powered V-1 flying bombs had been launched against London. As the war progressed, these terror weapons became a massive threat, as Johnny Johnson recalls: ‘I’d read the reports of the attacks on London. It was like a second Blitz and there was a sense of anger and a need to get back at the enemy.’1 From the cockpit of his Lancaster, one 617 Squadron pilot had even watched two of the first V-weapons being launched. ‘The flames from their base looked like a pale green telegraph pole,’ he said, ‘going straight up into the sky. Their flight path curved up, over and down into England.’2
For those on the ground, the experiences were horrific. One V-1 exploded near the BBC’s Bush House on the Aldwych in central London during the busy lunch hour. ‘It was as though a foggy November evening had materialised at the throw of a switch,’ a BBC employee recalled. ‘Through the dust and smoke, the casing of the bomb lay burning at the corner of Kingsway: three victims lay unmoving at the top of the steps, and figures were scattered all over the road.’ In a nearby first-aid post, the supervisor saw the body of a young female colleague. ‘She was naked and dead, stripped and killed by the blast. Another one I knew came in with blood spurting from her wrist and a deep gash in one eye. From 2.15 to 5.15 p.m. we were treating casualties.’ The final death toll was forty-six, but another six hundred people had been injured in this single attack.3
Nick Knilans also saw the impact of the buzz-bombs at close quarters when he spent a spell of leave in London. He went alone – none of his crew would go with him because of the V-1 threat – but Knilans:
did not fear them enough to keep me away from the good times to be had there. If you were in a pub, you could hear the steady droning noise of one approaching. All talk would stop. Someone would say, ‘Come on, you little bugger, come on!’ You would be safe if the buzz-bomb flew overhead before its engine cut out. Then it would glide into a nearby area but, hopefully, not damage the pub that you were patronising.
When he went to the cinema, a notice would regularly flash up on the screen, warning that the air-raid alert had been sounded, but he sat tight and saw ‘less than twenty people out of two hundred’ leaving to seek shelter. The all-clear notice would appear on the screen a few minutes later, but the whole procedure would be repeated several times during a single showing of a film.
Knilans had a very near miss while staying at the Regent Palace Hotel. He was going up in the lift to the sixth floor when it was ‘severely jolted by some noiseless explosion in the hotel. The elevator dropped rapidly some forty feet before the emergency brakes stopped it. The operator and I said nothing. She just took me back up to my floor.’
As soon as the lift doors opened, he was enveloped in a thick cloud of dust and smoke. As he began to walk along the corridor towards his room he saw that every door had been blown off its hinges and the floor was carpeted with glass, debris and fragments of clothing. His own room was covered in broken glass from the shattered windows. The bomb had struck the floor above, killing or injuring several employees resting in their rooms.
The launch facilities needed to be destroyed at all costs. The next generation of more powerful and longer-range V-2 rockets was also being prepared, but the V-3 supergun, an even more fearsome weapon of mass destruction, was being readied at Mimoyecques, 15 kilometres south-west of Calais. Code-named Hochdruchpumpe (High-pressure Pump), the V-3 assembly and launch site was buried in a labyrinth of tunnels, galleries and chambers carved out of the chalk bedrock and covering an area of two and a half square kilometres, up to 100 metres below ground. Should the flak batteries clustered around the site not prove sufficient deterrent to air attack, the facility was also shielded by a massive concrete roof 6 metres thick, pierced by a series of narrow openings lined with 20 centimetres of armoured steel. In the space of nine months, 120,000 cubic metres of concrete had been poured on the site, building the protective roof and the network of galleries and stores for the weapon, its explosives and propellants and the 1,200 men who were to garrison the site.
The heavily camouflaged site was devoid of visible activity, above ground at least, but was being closely watched by Military Intelligence, who reported that German scientists were completing a devastating new weapon there, though as yet they did not know what the weapon actually was. On 6 July 1944, 617 Squadron was tasked with attacking the complex. The aircrews were called into an early morning briefing, showing that it was to be a daylight raid, and at the same time 100 Halifax bombers from Main Force were carpet-bombing Mimoyecques, dropping almost 500 2,000-pound bombs on the site. However, while they wrecked the above-ground railway line and pounded the surface buildings and flak batteries, the 2,000-pounders did minimal damage below ground level. To destroy the facilities deep below the surface would require 617 Squadron’s ground-penetrating Tallboys.
Later that morning, Leonard Cheshire, now flying a single-seater American Mustang in preference to the slower British Mosquito, led a formation of the squadron’s Lancasters armed with Tallboys to destroy the site, whatever it hid. Cheshire had first flown the Mustang operationally in a raid on a V-weapon site at Siracourt ten days earlier. Astonishingly, the first time he had ever flown one was earlier that sam
e day. Don Cheney watched Cheshire:
teaching himself to fly this damn plane! He took off with the instruction book on his lap and the plane bouncing down the runway like a grasshopper. There was an awful struggle to get the wheels up but he finally succeeded and flew around for half an hour or so, then came back in and bounced a few more times as he landed and taxied in. He kept us all in stitches over drinks in the Mess that night, telling us about his struggles to find the bloody lever to raise the wheels.
Struggling with navigation over a blacked-out landscape, at night and often in bad weather, Bomber Command crews often got lost on their way to the target. Yet somehow Cheshire, sitting in the unfamiliar Mustang for only the second time, was capable not only of flying the aircraft at high speed and at low level, but also of navigating himself so precisely across the featureless Channel and the flatlands of northern France that he arrived directly over the target, smack on time.
The weather forecast for the Mimoyecques raid was clear skies for take-off and over the target, and, unlike the long-range ops targeting Munich or munitions factories in the south of France, this was, said John Pryor, ‘one of the raids that was over before you really got into it. We had taken off, arrived, and were on our journey home, all in about two and a half hours.’4
Although battered by Main Force, the camouflaged site was still heavily defended by the remaining flak batteries, but, ignoring the flak, Cheshire dived down in his Mustang and laid his red spot-fire markers directly onto the target from an altitude of 800 feet. As Cheshire circled, calling in the raiders one by one, he saw one Tallboy score a direct hit, clipping the corner of the concrete slab, while near-misses penetrated the earth around it. In all, eight Tallboys struck the earth close to the target at approaching the speed of sound, and drilled down deep below the ground before detonating. The craters they created on the surface were huge enough – between 25 and 35 metres in diameter and up to 15 metres deep – but most of the explosive power was confined below ground, where it had a devastating impact, caving in the vertical shafts and causing the subterranean tunnels to collapse, destroying the weapon but, in horrifying ‘collateral damage’, also burying alive the 300 slave labourers and their guards working below ground. Those who were lucky enough to have been above ground never returned to the site, which was abandoned on 26 July. Another of Hitler’s doomsday weapons had been destroyed.5