by John Nichol
In March 1944 Wizernes had been added to the list of targets for Operation Crossbow – the bombing campaign targeting all V-weapon sites – and over the following three months the USAAF and RAF carried out a series of raids, dropping 4,000 tons of bombs without causing any significant damage to the complex, though the constant air-raid warnings did stop construction over 200 times in May 1944 alone.
The Germans believed that no bomb could destroy the concrete dome, but Barnes Wallis had other ideas. He conceded that hitting the dome directly would have required an almost impossible degree of accuracy, and even Tallboys could simply bounce off the domed surface. However, Wallis had already argued persuasively that a near-miss with a Tallboy could be just as damaging, and possibly more so, than a direct hit, and if there were near-misses at Wizernes, the subterranean earthquake effect of the bombs would be enough to collapse the dome and block or destroy the underground tunnels, galleries and chambers.
Such was the secrecy involved in planning the attacks – coupled with the lack of knowledge about what the sites actually were – that most of the crews had no real idea that they were targeting V-weapon sites. On their first attack at Watten, the target was described as a ‘power station’, and ‘certainly no one told us it was a V-2 site,’ John Bell says. ‘I don’t remember any target ever being described as a V-2 site, it was just another target. We’d head in towards them and just attack the relevant markers.’
617 had been given the task of destroying the Wizernes complex using Wallis’s ground-penetrating Tallboys dropped from 17,500 feet to obtain maximum terminal velocity. Bombing from that height called for a very high degree of skill. Even with the SABS to assist accuracy, it was ‘like putting a bomb in a barrel’.10 Three previous raids had been unsuccessful, largely because of poor visibility over the target. On one daylight raid on 20 June there was so much dust and haze in the air that the results of the attack were inconclusive, though as they were returning to base, pilot John Pryor came up with the idea of the ‘gaggle’ system. It was a fairly compact formation but with each bomber at a different height and relative position to its neighbours, making them a more difficult target for flak batteries, giving all the aircrews the freedom to bomb without interference from those around them and also allowing each aircraft to make a direct run over the target without being buffeted by the slipstream from the one ahead of it. The gaggle formation was used on all subsequent 617 ops.11
The squadron returned to Wizernes for a night raid on 22 June, but thick cloud obscured the target completely and they were ordered back to base without dropping their bombs. On 24 June they tried again. Aerial reconnaissance had reported light cloud over the target area earlier in the day, so take-off was delayed until late afternoon.
Gerry Hobbs was a twenty-one-year-old from Guildford who had been a messenger boy in the Auxiliary Fire Service in Islington before joining up ‘because everyone else was – the war was on and it seemed the right thing to do’. He was the wireless operator in a Lancaster piloted by Flight Lieutenant John Edward as, in a cloudless sky, they climbed over the Channel. Heading towards the target, they could still see the English coastline behind them. They were on their straight and level bombing run when two flak bursts hit the aircraft, setting both port engines on fire. The flight engineer was killed instantly and, but for the huge bomb beneath them that absorbed much of the shrapnel, the flak might have claimed more victims.
Gerry Hobbs
‘When we were hit by flak it was so sudden,’ Hobbs says:
I could feel it peppering the side of the aircraft. A piece ripped past me tearing a piece from my parachute pack; you don’t think about it like this at the time, but I was only inches from death. That’s how fine the line was. You were quite isolated at your own station in the Lancaster – you didn’t really see what was happening in the rest of the aircraft – so all I knew initially was that the wing was on fire and we were in trouble.
Hobbs quickly switched from his radios to the intercom, and after the navigator and pilot had made unsuccessful attempts to extinguish the fires, he heard the pilot’s call of ‘Abracadabra! Jump! Jump!’ – the prearranged signal to abandon the aircraft.
We used that so there could never be any misunderstanding, because we’d heard of other crews baling out by mistake and the pilot bringing a half-empty aircraft back to base, but there was no doubt here – we were going down. There was no time to put out any calls on the radio, time simply ceased to exist in the normal way. It all became automatic. I was surprised at how calm I was, to be honest.
Hobbs could not later recall he and his crewmates ever speaking about the possibility of being shot down or killed. ‘Privately, I suppose there was always the thought of getting the chop at the back of your mind – there were a hundred and one ways: accidents in bad weather, mid-air collisions, flak, fighters, being hit by someone else’s bombs – but our main focus was on getting the job done and getting home to the pub!’
Now, for the first time, he had to face the reality. There was ‘a split-second panic’ as he tried to decide whether to take off his flying helmet, but then he moved aft, keeping his arm across his torn parachute pack from which silk was already billowing in the wind roaring through the holes in the fuselage. As he climbed over the main spar to reach the exit door, he met the Canadian mid-upper gunner, J. I. Johnston, coming the other way. Johnston shouted that the rear of the aircraft was ablaze and there was no escape that way. They hurried forward back over the main spar, feeling the aircraft shuddering as they did so. The flight engineer was lying on the floor, ‘clearly dead, but there was no time for regrets; we had to get out of this aircraft or we were all going down with it.’
As Hobbs stepped over the flight engineer’s body, he saw the pilot, Flight Lieutenant John Edward, leaving his seat. ‘He didn’t see us and I didn’t distract him, but I remember releasing his oxygen tube.’ As Edward made for the front hatch, the last thing Hobbs saw was the pilot checking his harness, and then Hobbs passed out from lack of oxygen.
When he regained consciousness, he was lying in a cornfield surrounded by German soldiers and French civilians. A column of smoke was rising from the burning wreckage of the aircraft in the next field. ‘The first thing I remember is coming to and seeing faces staring down at me,’ Hobbs recalls. ‘There had always been a chance that I’d come face to face with the enemy. Now the time had come. I wondered how they would react.’
He looked at the Germans and said ‘Deutsch?’ They said ‘Ja’ and that was ‘the limit of our conversation. Things were hazy. I must have banged my head on landing, as I had a broken nose as well as a broken right arm and leg. And the parachute must have dragged me, as my face, legs and hands were covered in cuts and grazes.’ He pointed to his top pocket and a Frenchman took out his cigarettes and lit one for him. Hobbs’s arm and leg were splinted and he was laid on a bed of straw on the floor in the back of a lorry and taken to hospital in St-Omer. Beside him lay the bomb-aimer, John Brook, and the Canadian navigator, Lorne Pritchard, who was alive, but ‘wrapped in his parachute with a lot of blood on it’.12 All three men became PoWs.
The Frenchman who had lit Hobbs’s cigarette was André Schamp, a member of the French Resistance, who had helped many British soldiers trapped in France after Dunkirk to escape through the Pat O’Leary organisation. After the war he was personally awarded the Croix de Guerre by General de Gaulle. He had been working in a garden in the nearby village when he saw the bomber coming down in flames. He ran across the fields towards it but was then ‘terrified, as the aircraft was right above me and whichever way I ran, it seemed to follow me’. When no more than 150 metres above him, it exploded in mid-air and crashed 200 metres away. ‘After the explosions, some parachutes came down like candles.’
In spite of the danger from exploding ammunition, he began to search for survivors, finding first the pilot and another crewman, who were both dead, and then the unconscious mid-upper gunner, Johnston. Schamp ran home to get a first-ai
d kit, taking Johnston’s revolver with him, which he hid. By the time he got back, Johnston had also died. The Germans had now arrived, but though they were suspicious that Johnston’s holster was empty when there was ammunition in the pouch, Schamp escaped further investigation that would surely have led to his death.
He began searching again and found Hobbs sitting in a field of oats, with his head barely visible above the crop. Schamp lit a cigarette for Hobbs, who thanked him in English and then said in French ‘Vive la France.’ There were no other survivors, for the rear gunner was dead, still trapped in his smouldering turret, and the other crewmen could not be found. The wounded men were taken to hospital by truck and became prisoners of war. The Tallboy bomb had not exploded and lay ‘flat in the ground to a depth of two metres’. It too was loaded onto a truck and taken away for examination by the Germans.
Schamp had to wait until late that night before the Germans allowed him to leave, but the next morning, as he came out of a church service in the village, a German army truck pulled up and he was ordered to remove the bodies of two of the dead airmen, the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Edward, and the rear gunner, Flight Sergeant Samuel Isherwood.
Schamp and his wife laid them on a cloth on the church floor and organised funerals for the following day. They tried to bribe a German guard with snacks and drinks to allow them to also bury the other gunner still trapped in his turret, but it took three visits to the German regional HQ to get the necessary permission. The dead gunner was ‘in a terrible condition and difficult to remove from his turret’, Schamp said, ‘but my courageous wife laid him out as best she could’. They dug three graves in the churchyard and made oak coffins for them. Because of the bombing, the electricity had been cut off and the coffins had to be made by hand. They did not finish them until 1 a.m. The next morning ‘a beautiful service was read in my own Roman Catholic religion’ and the bodies were buried. A month later the body of another crew member, Flying Officer W. J. King, was found about 200 metres from the crash site, apparently flung there by the force of the impact. He was buried at Longuenesse Military Cemetery.
Hobbs didn’t discover the fate of his pilot until after he returned home at the end of the war. ‘I always carried the hope he had survived. But soon after I got home I discovered he’d been killed. I don’t actually remember anything, but I presume that he must have pushed me out of the hatch but then couldn’t get out himself,’ Hobbs says, his voice faltering. ‘That’s something that has been on my mind for the last seventy years.’
Almost forty years later, accompanied by pilot John Edward’s sister and cousin, Gerry Hobbs met André Schamp for the first time since that brief encounter. ‘Their hospitality was overwhelming,’ Hobbs says. They visited the V-2 site at Wizernes they had been trying to bomb when they were shot down, before making a sad pilgrimage to lay flowers on the graves of Hobbs’s dead comrades.
* * *
Although a number of near-misses were recorded during the raid, causing damage to the railway lines and buildings around the site, and one pilot claimed to have seen a bomb penetrating the dome, Wizernes had again escaped fatal damage, and the squadron was sent back to finish the job on 17 July 1944, the first op under the leadership of Wing Commander James ‘Willie’ Tait, who had taken over command of 617 Squadron five days earlier.
Tait didn’t like the nickname ‘Willie’ at all, but it had stuck to such an extent that a request to meet ‘James Tait’ would have been met with blank looks from most of his squadron. Ruddy-faced and still only twenty-six, Tait was not a gregarious character like his predecessor. His perfect evening, according to some of his men, would have been sitting in a chair with his eyes closed, listening to classical music, not socialising in the Mess. He could appear aloof, even cold, but that was mainly a product of his shyness. Larry Curtis felt that he ‘could never get as close to Willie [as Cheshire]. I don’t think anyone really did so … maybe because he was a very shy person … but when he got in the air he was very much a pro.’13 However, others found him a more approachable character. ‘Almost every evening, unless there was something brewing,’ Arthur Ward, his wireless operator, said, ‘he’d be in the bar with a pint tucked under his arm and an old pipe going.’14
Whatever his social graces, in the place that really mattered – in the air – there was general agreement that he led from the front and was a worthy successor to the great Leonard Cheshire. Tait was, said one aircrewman, ‘a great CO, courteous, not frightening. He welcomed me to the squadron, but after that you didn’t really have any dealings with him on day-to-day squadron life. He was always leading from the front, an impressive man who we readily followed and looked up to.’15 His rear gunner added that Tait was ‘a dream to fly with, and this is especially noticeable in the rear turret, the best place to judge a pilot’s skill, believe me, where his feather-touch three-pointers hardly made the turret shudder.’
Tait had been obsessed with speed and fast cars since childhood – when he grew up, he owned a succession of sports cars and broke his leg when the starting handle of one kicked back as he was cranking it – but when his father took him to see the Schneider Trophy Air Race in 1928 he decided on the spot to become a pilot.
When he joined 617, he had already flown almost a hundred ops, plus ‘many others not recorded’, and had a DSO and Bar and a DFC to his name. By the time he left the squadron, he had added another two Bars to his DSO and a Bar to his DFC. His reputation as a brave and brilliant pilot extended far beyond 617 Squadron. ‘He had so many DSOs and DFCs,’ Australian pilot Bruce Buckham of 463 Squadron said, ‘that it’s a wonder to me that they didn’t give him a VC to go with them.’
Tait, flying the Mustang Cheshire had used, and Gerry Fawke in a Mosquito were to mark the target at the V-2 site at Wizernes for a force of sixteen Lancasters carrying Tallboys, while another Mosquito would film and photograph the aftermath of the bombing. It was a short flight to the Pas de Calais on a beautiful day, and ‘the view was amazing,’ Nicky Knilans recalls. ‘We’d had a couple of aborted trips because of cloud and now it was totally clear.’ Just fifty-nine minutes after take-off, Tait swooped down to 500 feet to mark the target through ‘a heavy hail of light flak and machine-gun bullets’.16 Fawke added two more markers ninety seconds later. Flying with 500-foot height separations, the Lancasters had all been ‘flying in a circle until the markers went in, then we all turned in together’.
As John Bell squinted down through the bombsight, he could see that the surrounding area was pockmarked with craters from previous attacks by 617 and Main Force. Bell could see the quarry, vehicles and railway lines and then ‘a small dot … this dome at the end. On the ground, it is massive, but of course from 18,000 feet it was just the tiniest of pimples on the earth.’ The target was visible at all only because the grey concrete dome stood out clearly against the dusty white of the surrounding chalk. Bob Knights made a good level run in, and Bell felt the aircraft lift as he released the bomb. ‘I watched it fall all the way,’ he says, ‘and of course, as it neared the ground, it still had a lot of forward motion so it actually looked like it was “flying” across the countryside, racing along.’ As he saw it explode right beside the dome, he shouted ‘Bullseye!’, elated with the achievement of seeing it strike right on target. When they got back on the ground at Woodhall Spa, Bob Knights’ crew were all ‘still on a high’, says Bell. ‘It was full circle: all that training, all that preparation, a great crew, great aircraft, an accurate bomb and bombsight, all coming together perfectly at the right moment.’
Knights’ crew usually celebrated another successful op by going to Boston or one of the local pubs. However, John Bell was now in a relationship with a WAAF called Florence who worked in the Intelligence Section, and so ‘tended to do my own thing a bit more’. He was at a dance in the Sergeants’ Mess, ‘quite shy and standing around, not quite knowing what to do’, when he was introduced to Florence, and they hit it off straight away and started spending a lot of time together.
The squadron intelligence officer became used to Bell popping in to the Intelligence Section and pretending to look at maps so he could see Florence. ‘There was an intensity to it all,’ Bell says. ‘It provided a real diversion from the enormity of what we were all doing on ops and the hectic, intense aircrew lives we were leading: living together, flying together, drinking together, and sometimes dying together. Florence and I would just get on our bikes, go off to the pub on our own and talk about normal things. Never for a meal, mind, we couldn’t afford that!’ Before long they were engaged.
* * *
Several of the other bombs dropped on the V-2 site had also detonated virtually simultaneously, multiplying the earthquake effect. ‘All we saw was this huge mushroom cloud over what had been the target.’17 The near-misses penetrated the ground and blew out the supports for the concrete dome, which collapsed, along with a huge section of the old quarry face. Barnes Wallis’s theory that a near-miss could be more damaging than a direct hit had been proved. German reports stated that ‘the whole area around has been so churned up that it is unapproachable and the bunker is jeopardised from underneath’, and the officer in charge of the site reported to his superiors that ‘Persistent air attack with heavy and super-heavy bombs so battered the rock all around that in the spring of 1944, landslides made further work impossible.’18