by John Nichol
‘Oh bloody hell, do something quick!’ was the only reply.
Knilans put down more flap, pushed the stick forward and they scraped over the top of the wires. He had to put the nose down again to pick up speed and stop the aircraft from stalling, then slowly crept higher, ‘milking off’ the flaps in stages. When he landed again, one of the civilian engineers who’d been watching from the control tower told Knilans he could not believe that a Lancaster could have taken off carrying that amount of weight from such a short runway. ‘I told Wingco Willie Tait I would not recommend doing it again either,’ Knilans said.
* * *
August 1944 had seen so many of Knilans’ friends killed, wounded or posted missing that ‘I was glad to see it end,’ he remembers. One of the missing, Don Cheney, shot down over Brest on 5 August, was still in hiding, shielded by Aristide Québriac, his brave wife and the Resistance fighters and their supporters. ‘They were all risking their lives to help me,’ Cheney says. ‘If we were ever caught, it was a PoW camp for me. They and their families would have been shot. They took huge risks to help me and without them I would have been a goner.’ The local priest visited him every two or three days, bringing fresh fruit, books in English and a paper bag full of loose French cigarettes that the priest had cadged from his parishioners.
As American troops advanced close to the town, the German garrison withdrew and set up positions in the surrounding countryside. Although there was always the threat that they might return, Cheney was able to move around with a little more freedom. After seventeen days, on 22 August 1944, Cheney, in company with an American airman the Resistance had also been sheltering, was taken to Quimper.
German troops still occupied the city, though, says Cheney: ‘they were hustling out of Quimper city hall, desperate to get out of the area as they must have realised that their time was up. I looked at their jackboots and their uniforms – here was the enemy on the run. But the dangers were still very real – who knows what they would do if they found a downed Allied flier in their midst? There was still a long way to go to safety.’
The two airmen were taken to a farmhouse outside the town for the night and then, still escorted by Resistance fighters, they went in search of the American lines. The battlefront was still very fluid and they never knew whether they were going to encounter German or American troops until they finally made contact with General Patton’s Fifth Armored Division, who were bivouacked in a pear orchard. Any hopes that they had found safety were rudely dispelled by an American colonel who told them, ‘Jesus, I don’t want anything to do with you fellows.’ He called in his Military Police and told them, ‘Get these guys out of here.’
They hurriedly got back in the vehicle and drove off, arriving in St-Brieuc later that afternoon. There they were introduced to a Canadian intelligence officer who had been working undercover with the French Resistance, running an escape line for Allied fliers. He put them on the only freight train heading north that day, making for the city of Rennes, which was now firmly in American hands. That proved to be good news for Cheney’s American companion, who was flown out the following afternoon, but the Americans wanted no part of Cheney, who was dumped at the roadside outside the USAAF base and told to try to flag down a passing RAF truck. No trucks came and on a burning-hot day Cheney was ‘eating dust all day as I walked back into Rennes’.
As he passed through the city, he saw a line of women collaborators having their heads shaved by the Resistance and the watching crowds scattering as German snipers still holed up in the steeple of the church loosed off a few shots. A Frenchman pointed Cheney to a road where he said there would be more trucks, and after walking for about a mile he flagged down an RAF pick-up that took him to Bayeux, where Allied ‘walkers-back’ – downed airmen who had evaded the Germans with the help of the Resistance – were being processed and repatriated.
When Cheney arrived, thinking his ordeal was over, he was promptly placed under arrest, locked in a trailer for several hours and then interrogated by a ‘ramrod-stiff Guards colonel from the old school, with a waxed moustache’. The colonel bombarded Cheney with questions about his unit, his aircraft, the names of his crew and a wealth of other details. He was then locked in the trailer again for the night, while his story was checked with Military Intelligence in London. The next morning the colonel freed him, telling Cheney his identity had been confirmed and he was being sent back to Northolt.
‘Thank you, sir, for your hospitality,’ Cheney said. ‘And thank you for not shooting me as a spy.’ The colonel never even cracked a smile.
When Cheney flew in to Northolt, it was, he remembers, ‘a wonderful feeling, almost too much to cope with, too much to believe. We were given new uniforms, a good bath, and deloused.’ His first action was to send a telegram to his parents, telling them he was safe – the only contact possible because they didn’t have a telephone – ‘but in the midst of my joy and relief,’ he says, ‘I was desperate to find out about my crew and what happened to them.’
He had been taken to the old Madame Tussaud’s building, which was being used as a debriefing centre, and was coming down the stairs when he bumped into his mid-upper gunner, Ken Porter, and his flight engineer, Jim Rosher, who had also been rescued and sheltered by the Resistance and had themselves arrived back in England only twenty-four hours earlier. Bearing in mind their near-death experience and astonishing escape from the enemy, their reunion seemed muted: ‘We just hugged, chatted and tried to catch up with everything that had happened,’ Cheney says. The other survivor, Len Curtis, had been captured by the Germans, but was freed when American troops overran the area and also repatriated.
Don Cheney reunited with his family
Although the fighting in Europe continued, Don Cheney’s personal war was over, and he returned to Canada on Thanksgiving Day, 9 October 1944, two years to the day since he had left. His family and his girlfriend Gladys met him at the Ottawa Union railroad station. When he’d been shot down, his parents had received the news he was missing and had told Gladys at once. ‘It was such a great shock,’ she says, ‘and then there was no more news, nothing at all. All I could do was sit and wait and hope. It was all about waiting: waiting for letters, waiting for telegrams, hoping for good news. Just waiting. Suddenly, there he was, running past the ticket collector.’
Cheney recalls:
I came through the barrier, and there were my mother, father and Gladys all lined up waiting. It was overwhelming for us all. They’d been there when I’d left two years before, now they were standing in the same place to welcome me home. I hadn’t even spoken to any of them for two years, but here was the image of home I had held on to and longed for during the darkest times. I realised how lucky I’d been. It was difficult to believe everything I’d gone through and yet I was now home. It was almost unreal. The first thing I asked for was a banana; I hadn’t seen one for years and really wanted one now! We piled into the car, laughing and crying, it was all a blur and such a happy time, but tinged with real sadness for my dead crew. Inside, I was still crying because of them and I still think of them every day.
He and Gladys were married six months later, on 21 April 1945.
* * *
On 1 September 1944, Nick Knilans dropped his 130th practice bomb. ‘I tried to add up the weight of all the bombs I had dropped on enemy cities and targets,’ he said. ‘It came to seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The number of human beings I had killed or wounded, I did not want to think about.’
He continued to fly more fuel-consumption tests and to practise ‘short-landings’, when, by ‘dragging’ the Lancaster in at low speed and low level, he was able to land and bring it to a halt in less than 800 yards instead of the normal 1,200–1,600. ‘Unbeknownst to me, this practice was soon to stand me in good stead.’
The true purpose of all this practice was soon to be revealed at a briefing for an operation that, if successful, was guaranteed to generate almost as much publicity and propaganda as the Dam
s raid that had made the squadron world-famous.
CHAPTER 11
The Beast
Tirpitz firing its guns
On 28 August 1944, some of the 617 Squadron aircrew were playing football on the airfield at Woodhall Spa when a stranger appeared on the touchline and asked for their CO, Wing Commander Willie Tait. Some time later, Tait returned to tell the footballers they had ‘a special job’ but would offer no other details until the day of the op. So it was not until 11 September 1943 that the crews made their way to the briefing room at Woodhall Spa, to be greeted by Tait, who was to brief them on Operation Paravane.
By now German forces were in full retreat across Europe and the tally of Allied victories and cities liberated was mounting by the day. German forces had surrendered at Toulon and Marseille on 28 August, Dieppe fell to the Allies on 1 September, Brussels was liberated two days later, Antwerp two days after that and Ostend on 8 August. On 10 August, Allied forces advancing from Normandy and from southern France linked up at Dijon, cutting France in half. That same day, Allied troops set foot on German territory for the first time as they advanced into Aachen.
The atmosphere as 617 Squadron assembled for their briefing the next day was a world away from the dark days when the squadron had first been formed, but they knew that there was still much to do both to guarantee the ultimate victory, and to minimise the Allied casualties it would entail. As they entered the foyer, the first thing they saw was Barnes Wallis standing proudly alongside one of his Tallboys, resting on its vanes, upside down.1 It was, said Bruce Buckham, ‘a beautiful big bomb [and so] highly machined, you could have shaved in it’.2
Until then, the crews had been given no clue about their target, though ‘we knew it was a long way away,’ Iveson said, ‘because we were practising cross-country flying with different path settings and different altitudes to work out fuel consumption. We knew it was going to be over a lot of water because we did dinghy drill. We knew it was a high-level attack because we did a lot of high-level bombing practice.’ They had been told only to bring ‘small kit’ – toothbrush and shaving tackle – with them, leading some to assume they were being sent to attack targets in Italy and then flying on to North Africa to refuel, as they had done before on two or three occasions.3 When the aircrews entered the briefing room, they saw that Tait had something on the table in front of him, shrouded with a black cloth. Like a conjuror producing a rabbit from a hat, he allowed the tension to build for a few moments and then whisked the cloth away with a flourish, revealing a scale model of the German battleship Tirpitz.
Launched at Wilhelmshaven in 1939, Tirpitz was even bigger than its sister ship the Bismarck, and was the largest and most modern German warship ever built. Two hundred and fifty metres long and displacing over 50,000 metric tons when fully loaded, it was so big that novice seamen often got lost as they tried to find their way around. It had its own library, post office, cinema, bakery, and even published a twice-weekly newspaper for its 1,700-man crew. It could cruise at 35 miles per hour, faster than any British warship, its battery of 120 guns included eight 15-inch guns with a range of 17 miles that could menace targets invisible beyond the horizon, and, like all the Tirpitz’s guns, could be elevated enough to target incoming aircraft. The ship was so heavily armoured that conventional bombs simply bounced off a toughened steel carapace that was over a foot thick.
Hitler called it ‘the pride of the German Navy’. Churchill growled that it was ‘The Beast’ and, based in occupied Norway, it was a constant potential threat to the Arctic and Atlantic convoys. ‘I crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth with sixteen thousand American troops,’ Tony Iveson said, ‘and there was still an awful lot of transatlantic traffic: personnel, weapons, food and fuel. If the Tirpitz had gone into the Atlantic, sunk one or two of those large ships, drowning a lot of American troops, it might have affected America’s attitude towards Europe and the war.’ The mere existence of the Tirpitz was sometimes enough to cause panic. In July 1942, false rumours that the battleship was at sea had persuaded the Admiralty to order the convoy PQ17 to scatter, and without their escorts to protect them, twenty-four of the convoy’s thirty-five ships were lost.
There had already been thirty-three previous attacks on the Tirpitz. The Royal Navy had sent five aircraft carriers to destroy it, but despite attacks by hundreds of Fleet Air Arm aircraft, midget submarines – all of which were destroyed in their attack – torpedoes and dive bombers, the Tirpitz remained afloat. Now the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron had been given the task of finishing the job.
Although British commanders clearly regarded the Tirpitz as a vital target – and three British capital ships were kept tied up in Scapa Flow just in case the Tirpitz emerged onto the open seas – to at least one crew member of 617 Squadron, the battleship was ‘just another target. Nothing special.’4 Thirty-six Lancasters were to take part, eighteen from 617 and another eighteen from 9 Squadron at Bardney, plus a Lancaster photography plane, ‘Whoa Bessie’, from 463 Squadron – one of four all-Australian RAAF squadrons attached to Bomber Command. Captained by Flight Lieutenant Bruce ‘Buck’ Buckham, his aircraft would be carrying four extra men in addition to his crew: two cine-cameramen, BBC correspondent Guy Byam and W. E. West of the Associated Press.
Buckham was a twenty-six-year-old who had completed his first thirty-op tour of duty on bombers in early 1944. It had included a solo mission to Berlin and a raid on the Krupp steelworks in Essen, during which he lost two engines and, hit by flak, had to extinguish a ferocious on-board fire by throwing his bomber into a perilous dive, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for his valour.5 Recalled for a second tour, Buckham and his crew were then selected to fly a special Lancaster fitted with camera equipment to record high-profile bombing operations at close range.
The Lancaster bombers were perfect for the task: ‘The Lancaster was noisy and could be uncomfortable, but it was totally and utterly reliable’6 and ‘a damn good bombing platform. It was very, very steady and there was no better launching pad … particularly on a precision bombing such as the Tirpitz.’7 The Tallboy bombs they were carrying were ‘an incredible sight’, one crewman said, ‘something to be reckoned with, an amazing piece of engineering which almost filled the bombbay,’8 and they were the only RAF weapons capable of penetrating the battleship’s thick steel armour plating.
Intelligence reports indicated that, protected by submarine and torpedo nets, the Tirpitz was anchored in Kaa Fjord, an arm of Altenfjord (now Alta Fjord), protected by a wall of mountains, inside the Arctic Circle, right at the northernmost tip of Norway. With a Tallboy in the bomb bay and full fuel tanks, the Lancasters weighed over 67,000 pounds at take-off, and the Tirpitz’s location put it beyond their range for a return flight, even from the closest UK base in the north of Scotland.
The only option was to break the trip into stages, refuelling in northern Scotland and then flying on to a base near Archangel – a ‘city’, actually little more than a huddle of wooden buildings, in Soviet Russia, several hundred miles south-east of the target. That would serve as the base from which to attack the Tirpitz, returning to Russia to refuel again before flying back to Britain. Even using Archangel as a staging post would necessitate a twelve-hour flight from Britain. ‘It would have been nice if they had added a co-pilot,’ Nick Knilans said, with a smile. ‘I did not look forward to a twelve-hour flight without any help. I did not expect to leave my seat in the cockpit either. Nor did I.’
In order to have the range to reach Archangel, the Lancasters also had to be stripped of their mid-upper turrets and fitted with overload tanks in the fuselage above the bomb-bay. Knilans and his flight engineer, Ken Ryall, briefed the others on the optimal pitch and throttle settings to make the most of their available fuel. Two Liberator aircraft were also being used to ferry ground crew, spares and all the other equipment needed to keep thirty-seven Lancasters combat-ready, and the station’s medical officer went with them to tend to any illness victims or casualt
ies.
The briefing on 11 September 1944 made use of a large-scale model of the fjord, including the Tirpitz, anchored close to the wall of mountains that made any airborne attack incredibly difficult.9 In addition to the ship’s own guns, there were flak batteries on the shores, and a pipeline with a series of smoke canisters encircling the fjord, able to create an almost impenetrable smokescreen within ten minutes of a warning being given. Tait hoped that by approaching at low level and from an unexpected direction – the south or south-east – he and his men would give Tirpitz no more than eight minutes’ warning of their approach, leaving a two-minute window in which to drop their bombs before the smokescreen made accurate bombing almost impossible. But to take advantage of that two-minute window of opportunity would require almost twenty-seven and a half hours of total flying time.
Later on 11 September – Tony Iveson’s twenty-fifth birthday – the Lancasters thundered into the air from Woodhall Spa and, having refuelled at Lossiemouth, set course for Russia. One aircraft from 9 Squadron had to be left behind, after its Tallboy slipped off its mountings in mid-air and had to be jettisoned. The rest, carrying a ton more weight in fuel and bomb-load than the Lancaster’s design limit, flew past the Orkneys and the Shetlands and across the North Sea at low level – 400 feet – to avoid detection by German radar, skimming over a few isolated fishing boats. The navigators plotted the course by dead reckoning, and ‘it required great concentration to keep track of where we were,’ Basil Fish, one of the 617 Squadron’s navigators, says, ‘and where we were supposed to end up. Quite a journey into the unknown.’10