by John Nichol
As they reached the Norwegian coast, they could see the fjords and mountains by the light of the half-moon. Climbing to 14,000 feet, they cleared the peaks then crossed into Sweden and the Gulf of Bothnia and turned north. Malcolm ‘Mac’ Hamilton’s crew ‘got all excited’ looking down from the windows at a brightly lit town below them – they’d never seen lights from the air before. ‘We’d been under the blackout in Britain and across the whole of France and Germany. Someone said, “It’s like fairyland, isn’t it!” Then we were back into the dark as we flew on into Finland.’11
As they flew on, they could see vast swathes of blackened forest that had been destroyed in the Russo-Finnish War of 1940. Even though the Russians had given the squadron a call sign, to identify themselves as friendly forces, Soviet guns fired at them as they crossed the border into Russia. Hamilton’s gunner, Gerry Witherick, ‘a Cockney through and through, and a great humourist’,12 was so furious at being fired on by supposedly friendly forces that he claimed to have written ‘G A Witherick’ right across one of their gun emplacements with his own guns.13
Witherick did 100 ops as an air gunner and always claimed, with a wink, that it was the easiest way he had ever found to earn a living.14 He had also flown numerous anti-submarine patrols with 405 Squadron, but claimed that he never counted them in his total of ops as ‘all we did was to fly over water!’ He added that while he never saw a single enemy submarine, he was shot at by the Royal Navy every time he went out to help them.15
During the marathon flight, several Lancasters had also come under anti-aircraft fire from Swedish and Finnish guns, and Flying Officer Bill Carey’s Lancaster caught so much flak that, after he landed, he took no further part in the op. It was not the last flak attack Carey would endure.
As dawn broke, the aircrews found themselves over the ‘vast forests and swamps which characterise that part of Russia’.16 The weather had been poor all the way and there was no let-up as they approached Archangel. The Russians had assured them that there was perfect visibility, but in fact, Bruce Buckham said, ‘it was ten/tenths the other way: low cloud, raining, pretty well down to the deck’. They were flying in low cloud just over the tops of trees with mist laced between them, and even at that very low level the aircrew had only occasional glimpses of the ground below. Larry Curtis described the maps that the navigators were having to work with as ‘pretty poor. The signals information was pitiful.’
The navigators were plotting the course by dead reckoning. ‘We had no radio beams or beacons to guide us,’ Nick Knilans said, and their only maps were outdated relics from the British North Russia Expeditionary Force’s occupation of Murmansk and Archangel in 1918–1919, in a futile attempt, in its chief architect Winston Churchill’s words, ‘to strangle at birth the Bolshevik State’. ‘Now you have got radar, GPS, and all these things, you could go and find Archangel,’ Tony Iveson said. ‘Frankly we had Sweet Fanny Adams, beyond the co-ordinates of the airfield we were going to.’ The Russians were supposed to be sending out a radio signal for the Lancaster crews to home on, but their radios remained silent. ‘I think someone forgot the difference between the Russian and English alphabet,’ Tony Iveson said, ‘so when the wireless operator tried to make contact, he got nothing.’
As a result, as Bob Knights wryly commented, navigation ‘was all really by guess and by God’, and given the lack of maps and radio communications, and the appalling weather conditions, it was thanks to a truly astonishing feat of flying and navigation that they found Archangel at all. Bruce Buckham descended through the dense cloud to Onega Bay on the White Sea about 125 miles west of Archangel, where he found eight or ten other aircraft ‘milling around’. They then flew ‘like a string of ducks’ about 50 feet above the beach right around the foreshore to Archangel and then down the river Dvina looking for Yagodnik aerodrome, where they were supposed to land. It was a grass airfield on an island in the middle of the river, but the weather was so bad and visibility so poor that many of them couldn’t find it. Almost all the pilots had similar difficulties, even when flying as low as 100 feet, and some of those who did land had branches and foliage from the treetops they had clipped jammed in tail wheels and elevator controls.
The flight was ‘at the limits of endurance’, Tony Iveson said. ‘I was in the air for twelve hours and twenty minutes; I had never done anything like that before. To some degree we were all exhausted, but when you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen, you maintain a certain awareness!’
Everyone was running short of fuel, and in desperation Bruce Buckham led some of his ‘flight of ducks’ back to the river mouth, where they landed at a tiny airfield on Kergostrov Island. It was normally used by aircraft no larger than two-seater Tiger Moth trainers, but somehow the monster Lancasters with their 12,000-pound bomb-loads managed to land there, though when Buckham did so, ‘some incongruous sights met our eyes. There were Lancasters with their noses pushed into buildings, some with only their tails showing through walls or roofs, and others on their bellies.’ A few of those had to be declared ‘u/s’ – unserviceable – and abandoned there.
Mac Hamilton eventually found Yagodnik and did a run across the airfield, but couldn’t see any markers, though he saw a windsock at one end, confirming it was an airfield of sorts, albeit a very rough one. ‘I looked down at what I thought were posts with white tops on them.’ When he got a bit lower he realised that they were Russian sailors wearing white hats – ‘they’d marked it [the runway] with their own men!’17
Those who reached Yagodnik were greeted by a Russian band and a banner reading ‘Welcome to the Glorious Fliers of the Royal Air Force’. However, only about half the Lancasters made it; the rest of the ‘glorious fliers’ were ‘spread out over Russia’ or had crash-landed – six pilots had to make emergency landings. Flying Officer Ian Ross searched for Yagodnik for two hours and then, with only 30 gallons of fuel remaining, opted to crash-land, wheels-up, in a marshy field alongside the railway to Molotovsk. He put down safely without injury to the crew, but his Tallboy was torn loose and ‘ploughed a furrow about a hundred yards long’. By the time the crew clambered out they were confronted by ‘six Russian soldiers with machine-guns, one of whom was kicking the nose of our bomb and another trying to steal the bombsight’.18
A packet of English cigarettes was enough to restore international relations, but the aircraft was a write-off, as was Squadron Leader Drew ‘Duke’ Wyness’s Lancaster. He landed in a grassy field apparently used by Soviet fighters, but the ground was so wet that when he applied his brakes the plane simply skidded across the field and slid into a fence, wrecking the port undercarriage. Four 9 Squadron aircraft were also damaged beyond repair.
Nick Knilans had kept descending as the cloud base lowered. Finally he was ‘at treetop level and the clouds were there too’. Larry Curtis, Knilans’ wireless operator, knew that they were within 60 miles of Archangel but ‘frankly got lost … We had a twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bomb underneath, we were pretty lost, the weather was awful.’ They descended as low as Knilans dared, trying to pick up a landmark, but all they could see were rivers and pine forest. Curtis remembered:
We had decided to ditch in one of the rivers, and had got rid of the escape hatches. All the target maps went out of the window, my brand-new hat which I’d bought to impress the Russians went out. We were just about to ditch when we saw another Lancaster. We presumed he knew where he was so we flew up to him. He probably thought the same about us, so we went in circles.19
Eventually, desperately short of fuel and still with no accurate idea of their location, Knilans turned on to a reciprocal course and flew back to the White Sea, where he glimpsed a hayfield on the edge of Onega Bay that looked as if it might once have been used as an airstrip. As he was circling over it, he saw ‘five barefoot boys about ten years old. They made vigorous motions with their heads and hands. I gathered that they were signalling that it would be OK to land there.’ He flew up a gully below the level of the field
, with the smoke from a house chimney showing that he was approaching downwind, but he ‘did not expect to float far with a six-ton bomb aboard’.
He pulled up as he reached the barbed-wire fence surrounding the field, then cut the throttles the instant he cleared it, landing so close to it that the rear gunner later told him that his gun barrels had clipped the barbed wire. He couldn’t keep the brakes on because mud and turf were piling up in front of the wheels, threatening to break the undercarriage, but the far fence was rapidly approaching. He managed to slew around a haystack and came to a halt next to the boys without any major damage to his aircraft. He gave them a smile and thumbs-up sign by way of thanks. He had been flying for twelve and a half hours, and was so short of fuel that two of his engines had cut out on landing.
Tony Iveson had seen him land and now came in himself, ‘empty and upwind’, but landed safely. ‘I felt to press on blindly into the unknown with fuel draining away was mad,’ Iveson said. Soviet troops eventually appeared. ‘They were wearing greycoats, hadn’t shaved for a week and looked as if they would cut our throats for a rouble or two.’ They put the aircrew in the back of an open truck and jolted over a rough track into the town, where they met the Town Major. With neither side able to communicate with the other in English, Russian or the aircrews’ smattering of French or German, they were taken to a loghouse and locked up while their hosts radioed Archangel or Moscow for instructions.
An hour later, having established that the aircrew were friends and allies, they released them and fed them salmon, potatoes and black bread and what appeared to be glasses of water, though as Iveson discovered when he downed his in one, it was actually vodka. ‘The Russian Major stood up and toasted the Royal Air Force,’ he said, ‘so I stood up and toasted the Red Army.’
Although East–West relations had now thawed a little, a soldier armed with a rifle with fixed bayonet still stood guard over them and accompanied them whenever anyone wanted the latrine. There was no basin, nor even any water, only a log raised knee-high above an open ditch. ‘I thought that they could have peeled the bark off the log at least,’ Knilans later joked. They discovered they were being housed in a rest camp for survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad, but ‘it was pretty grim,’ Larry Curtis said, ‘and seemed to have been built in a swamp; most of the paths were trees that had been cut down. It was the first time I saw Red Army women. They did the same jobs and looked more like men than the men, but they were kind and helpful.’20
The Russians succeeded in manhandling the two aircraft around – a task that would have been easier had they remembered to take the brakes off first – and lined them up, using the main street – which was surfaced with logs laid side to side – to serve as a rough and very uneven runway. They even extended it by laying more logs while the aircrews were sleeping.21
A Lancaster forced to crash-land searching for Archangel airfield
The next morning Willie Tait arrived from Yagodnik in an antique Russian biplane and summoned a transport aircraft, bringing just enough fuel in 50-gallon drums to get the Lancasters to Yagodnik. The fuel all had to be laboriously hand-pumped into the Lancasters’ tanks and, said Knilans, ‘the Russians let us do all the pumping’.
Iveson and Knilans then took off again. Iveson had a relatively trouble-free flight but Knilans and his crew were lucky to survive. With the Merlin engines on full emergency power, he managed to get airborne right at the water’s edge, and climbed to 1,000 feet. However, the long flight to Russia on a lean fuel mixture had caused the spark plugs to foul up, and when he throttled back to keep behind Tait’s slower aircraft which was leading them to Yagodnik, his engines coughed, spluttered and then stopped. He shoved the control column fully forward with his left hand and simultaneously rammed all four throttle levers to the stops. The increased air pressure from the dive turned the propellers over enough to restart the engines, and he began to pull up from the dive just above the forest canopy.
Wanting to help, the flight engineer raised the flaps but, never having touched them before, he did not realise that this would cause the aircraft to sink or ‘mush’ several feet. The aircraft lost enough altitude to drop into the tops of the trees, cutting a swathe through them like a sickle through grass. Knilans could not pull up more sharply, since that would have dropped the tail even deeper into the trees, with fatal consequences. However, the thicker trunk of a lone pine tree towering above the others was now looming ahead of them. Knowing that it would wreck the propellers if it hit them, but unable to avoid it completely, Knilans aimed straight for it, taking the force of the impact on the Perspex nose of the aircraft.
A three-foot section of the tree was driven through the bomb-aimer’s Perspex ‘goldfish bowl’, narrowly missing Knilans and his bomb-aimer and flight engineer. The impact also smashed the Perspex cockpit, destroyed the bombsight and tore off the doors of the bomb-bay. The slipstream roared through the broken cockpit and out through the dinghy escape hatch over the pilot’s head, and everything movable that had not been lost or jettisoned in the landing the previous day, including navigator Don Bell’s maps, was now sucked out of the aircraft by the ferocious wind. ‘They all shot up through the escape hatch to flutter about over the Russian landscape.’ The starboard engine’s radiator had also become so clogged by pine cones and needles that it overheated and had to be shut down.
Knilans had to fly on one-handed, covering his eyes with his other hand to protect them from the ferocious wind and squinting out through slightly separated fingers. Even though some of his controls were jammed, he managed to land at Yagodnik on three engines. As they clambered out of the aircraft and rushed across the airfield to join the briefing for the attack on the Tirpitz, Don Bell still had pine needles and bits of twig in his hair.22 The piece of the tree was retrieved from the aircraft and later became a treasured souvenir in the Mess at Woodhall, captioned ‘Believe it or not!’23
Collisions with the buildings surrounding the Kergostrov airfield had already damaged a few Lancasters when they landed there, and they proved equally dangerous when they took off again after the weather cleared a little. Bruce Buckham was the first to take off towards the buildings at the end of the runway. He ‘literally bounced the aircraft into the air by moving the control column backwards and forwards and getting a big enough bounce, and at the appropriate time, turning it on its side and flying sideways out through [a gap between] these buildings.’
All he could hear over the RT was the other pilots saying, ‘Oh Christ! Oh shit! Have we got to do that?’
‘Yeah,’ Buckham said. ‘That’s the only way you’re going to get off.’24
Once airborne – by a miracle without further aircraft losses – Buckham’s ‘flight of ducks’ made the short flight down to Yagodnik, where the surviving aircraft were being readied for the attack. During the day most of the other missing Lancasters arrived, but only twenty-seven of the original force of thirty-seven aircraft were still serviceable as, in addition to the write-offs, the ground crew had to cannibalise some damaged aircraft to repair the others. Refuelling was also a painstaking business, again using hand-pumps to transfer the fuel, this time from 44-gallon drums. It took over eighteen hours to refuel the entire force.
With thick cloud cover over the target, the crews were stood down until the skies cleared, and they remained at Yagodnik for three days. Each morning the PRU (Photographic Reconnaissance Unit) Mosquito took off and overflew the target area, to check that the Tirpitz was still anchored there and to look for a break in the weather that would allow the attack to be launched. The Mosquito, painted pale blue, was much admired by the Russians, who had never seen such a beautiful aircraft before.
While they waited for the skies over the target to clear, Knilans and some of the other 617 Squadron aircrew were billeted in an underground barracks with a wood stove at one end and a washroom and bucket toilets at the other. The barracks was presided over at night by a ‘large, pleasant-mannered female soldier’. Although they could not
speak each other’s language, Knilans ‘gave her some body powder and cigarettes’ and they bonded enough to take a walk in the starlight. ‘There was a bit of Allied nuzzling and a mutually satisfying frolic on the tundra.’
The remaining aircrew had been billeted on the Ivan Kalleyev, a bug-infested river steamer anchored in the river Dvina. The Russians said it was the best accommodation there, though Bruce Buckham thought ‘it made the Altmark [a German oil tanker and supply vessel] look like the Queen Mary’. ‘The bugs bit us to bits,’ Iveson said, smiling at the memory. ‘The only man they didn’t bite was the CO – even Communist bugs had respect for rank!’ Bad as it was, the ferry boat was more salubrious than the accommodation provided for the ground crew who, like Knilans’ crew, were given dank, stinking underground quarters that housed ‘breeding colonies’ of lice and bedbugs.
Despite the medical officer spraying their cabins and dusting their sheets with insecticide powder, by the next morning several of them were ‘covered in enormous red blotches, one chap’s eyes were completely closed up and another looked as if he’d developed mumps in the night.’25 As at Onega Bay, ‘women seemed to do all the work and were loading logs on the ship and … women cleaners came in every morning to wash the floors and paid no attention to us getting up half-dressed. The Russian men stood on the deck smoking while the women worked.’26
The Russians entertained their visitors with vodka. It was not the familiar clear spirit, but ‘a thick syrupy stuff like paraffin … We didn’t perform too well and got quite sloshed,’ Buckham recalled. One Canadian was sufficiently inebriated to decide that a swim in the freezing river was a good idea and had to be rescued by a Russian launch. The following night the visitors returned the hospitality. ‘They were doing quite creditably,’ Buckham said, ‘until we got a bit naughty and started mixing whiskey with brandy and gin and everything – they were real Molotov cocktails!’