by John Nichol
Even though the aircrew didn’t have any kit with them, they also played a football match against the Russians. It was supposed to be a friendly, but some of the opposition were ‘Mongols, about seven feet tall with stainless steel teeth – they bowled us over like ninepins!’ The Russians won nine–nil, and when the 617 Squadron men weren’t picking the ball out of their own net, they were standing to attention, because the game stopped after each goal while the Soviet national anthem was played.
That night, the Russians laid on a film show for their guests. The film was a record of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and some of the atrocities they had committed, secretly filmed by concealed cameras. ‘After witnessing that for half an hour, we’d had enough,’ Buckham said, ‘because it wasn’t nice seeing people raped, others garrotted and strung up to lamp-posts, and so on. We got up to walk out, but we were very smartly jostled back with tommy guns pointing at our guts, so we had to sit down again and take the rest of it.’
They also had to endure the sight of other atrocities, this time perpetrated by their allies at much closer quarters. The steamer in which they were housed was normally used for transporting political prisoners up to the Lake Yagoda area, and the 617 Squadron aircrew saw many prisoners there, cutting up wood for the winter. ‘As they ran out of steam, the NKVD man [guarding them] used to take a stock whip off his shoulder and flick them with the whip. They’d do that for a couple of days and when they didn’t get up, they just pumped them full of bullets. This was right in front of our eyes and we just had to take it, we couldn’t do anything about it.’27
Another film show was scheduled for the following night, but after protests to their interpreter, who had ‘silver-filled teeth and smelled strongly of perfume’, Popeye and Mickey Mouse cartoons were shown instead of more propaganda films. They also learned to dance the Russian way and taught the Russians to jitterbug in return.28
* * *
To the aircrews’ relief, on 15 September 1944 the pilot of the PRU Mosquito at last flew low over the airfield and fired the green flare that showed the skies over Altenfjord were clear. The twenty-five remaining Lancasters, already fuelled and bombed up, took off at once, serenaded by a Russian band playing ‘Hail the Conquering Hero Comes’. ‘It seemed a bit premature in retrospect,’ one aircrewman remarked.29 They headed towards the target at low level, keeping below 1,000 feet to avoid detection by German radar. Among them, astonishingly, was Nick Knilans’ Lancaster, which the ground crew had managed to restore to flyable condition.
The Russian fuel was not of the highest quality and purity, with the result that ‘when you got the revs down and put a bit of pressure in the cylinders, the thing “pinked” like mad. So we had to keep the revs up, but we weren’t too bothered about fuel as it was only a six-hour trip.’30 The flight to the target crossed Russia, Finnish Lappland and Finnmark, but though they overflew a German airbase in Finnish Lappland, no fighters rose to intercept them. There was a fighter base at Bardufoss, south of Tromsø, but the Germans evidently considered the flak batteries and smokescreen enough protection for the Tirpitz, and there was no fighter cover as the bombers approached. ‘We didn’t believe that they would reach us up there in the north,’ one of the Tirpitz’s anti-aircraft gunners, Klaus Rohwedder, recalls, but such complacency was rudely shattered as the ship’s alarms began to sound and the crew scrambled to battle stations.31
Although Bruce Buckham in the camera plane went in ‘pretty low’, the remaining aircraft made a steep climb to avoid light flak and reach their normal bombing height of 13,000 to 18,000 feet, to allow the Tallboy to reach its maximum terminal velocity. Tony Iveson had his first sight of the Tirpitz as he reached 16,000 feet: ‘I just saw this black shape against the cliffs. From that height it didn’t look like the awesome battleship that I had heard of, it looked like a toy.’
As they climbed, they could see from 15 miles out that the Tirpitz must have had an early warning, because the pipeline around the shore was already belching out thick black smoke. Had the crews flown straight in, they might have had a better sight of the target, but they kept to the pre-planned dog-leg approach, and by the time most were beginning their bomb-runs, ‘literally hundreds of smoke canisters on the water, the ship, and the land’ were doing their job so effectively that the fjord was practically full of smoke.
Knilans and a handful of others managed to drop their bombs before the ship was completely obscured, and his bomb-aimer ‘Taffy’ claimed a direct hit, though, as Knilans wrily acknowledged, Taffy ‘never failed to claim a hit on target’. The anti-aircraft guns had opened up when the Lancasters were eight minutes from the target. ‘There was a blue searchlight and then the gunfire,’ one crewman recalled. ‘We looked down and you could see Tirpitz under the cliffs … but there was so much flak we didn’t stand much chance of getting near it.’32 Several bombers were hit, including that of the accident-prone Knilans, who lost an engine after dropping his bomb and had to make another three-engined landing, the seventh of his career, back at Yagodnik after the raid. The battleship’s guns were still firing at the raiders, but that largely helped to improve the aiming point for the bomb-aimers. Despite the difficulties in clearly identifying the target through the smoke, seventeen Lancasters, led by Willie Tait, dropped their Tallboys.
A 9 Squadron pilot claimed the first hit at 10.55 that morning, 617’s John Pryor claimed a second a minute later, and Squadron Leader Fawke a third at nine minutes past eleven. As well as Knilans’, there were three other probable near-misses by other 617 crews, and Wing Commander Tait’s Tallboy was thought to have ‘gone right through the bows of the vessel and exploded in deep water’. However, the aircrews’ initial impression, apparently confirmed by subsequent surveillance flights, was that neither this nor any of the other bombs had caused fatal damage to the Tirpitz, and in any event the smoke and the flak bursts made the claims of hits or near-misses problematic. ‘One of the lads I knew said he’d hit the Tirpitz,’ Wilfred Bickley, a Devonian with a broad accent and an even broader smile, recalled with a laugh, ‘but when they checked the picture, he’d only blown up the gas works about three miles away!’33 Bruce Buckham dropped the eight ‘Johnny Walker’ magnetic mines that he was carrying inside the torpedo nets around the Tirpitz, hoping that their oscillating track when in water would draw them against the ship’s steel hull, but once more there was no visible result.
Bob Knights’ bomb-aimer couldn’t see the target for the smoke and didn’t bomb at all. Knights later recalled that ‘Leonard [Cheshire] always said: “Barnes Wallis has produced these marvellous bombs, they’re very expensive and I don’t want them thrown all over Europe. If you can’t put them on the target, bring ’em back!”’ ‘We were told that these new bombs cost £1,500 each,’ Tony Iveson added, ‘a huge amount of money then, so we didn’t want to spray them around the countryside.’
Like Knilans, Knights lost an engine and landed at Archangel on the remaining three. Not only did they have to replace the faulty engine but the Russian ground crew dropped the Tallboy through the open bomb doors and onto the ground. Luckily for them and the watching British aircrew, ‘it was all soggy grass’ and the bomb did not detonate.
While the rest of the Lancasters returned to Yagodnik to refuel, Bruce Buckham’s less fuel-hungry aircraft had begun the long flight direct to the UK. He first had to fly towards the North Pole, beyond the range of German fighters based in Norway, and then turned south, flying on over the North Sea ‘through the most atrocious weather I’d ever seen … There was nowhere to fly apart from the space between the tops of the angry sea and the bottom of the snow- and ice-laden cloud.’ He battled through it for six hours, averaging only about 60 miles an hour instead of the Lancaster’s normal 200 to 220 mph, and was desperately short of fuel when he at last landed back in Lincolnshire. He and his crew had been airborne for fifteen and a half hours, ‘the longest bomber flight and certainly the longest by a Lancaster throughout the war’.34
On their
return to Yagodnik, the remaining Lancaster crews had to wait for the reconnaissance Mosquito to come back to find out if the raid had been successful, though most already shared Tony Iveson’s belief that ‘We hadn’t finished with Tirpitz. There was relief that we were off the target, but also the knowledge that we were going to have to go back and revisit her.’ That was confirmed when the reconnaissance photographs showed that the Tirpitz was still afloat, ‘which absolutely broke our hearts’, Larry Curtis said.35 Even worse, ‘the Russians minced no words about our failure: They knew we wouldn’t be able to sink the Tirpitz.’36
The Russians laid on some entertainment for 617 Squadron that night. They climbed aboard a boat, steamed downriver to Archangel and marched from the dock to an auditorium where a stage show had been put on. Mac Hamilton and Nick Knilans decided to make their own entertainment and slipped out of the darkened theatre. Having sold some cigarettes for roubles, they found a nearby hotel where they drank some straight shots of vodka in the bar. Before long their roubles were running out, but they then got chatting to two British sailors who took them to the locked building that held the ships’ stores for Royal Navy vessels visiting Archangel. One of them had a key and five minutes later they were heading for an open peasant market, each with a gallon can of jam under his arm. They sold them to eager buyers, and, well equipped with a fresh supply of roubles, went back to the hotel bar, where some Russians joined them. Some time later, the two sailors were fast asleep with their heads on the table and two of the Russians had fallen off their chairs and were lying on the floor but, said Knilans, ‘Mac and I were feeling no pain,’ when a strange RAF Wing Commander appeared.
‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you gentlemen part of the group from the auditorium? Well, the rest of your chaps are down on the dock. They’ve been there for about an hour by now.’ He turned out to be the Air Attaché from the British Consulate in Archangel. He led them from the hotel to a waiting staff car and drove them to the dock, where ‘Wingco Tait and the other aircrew did not seem too amused at our holding them up. I decided to stay out of wrath’s way,’ Knilans said, ‘and went down below deck. The Russian captain gestured me into a small kitchen–dining room. The cook gave me a plate of fried fish and mashed potatoes. All in all, I was quite pleased with the day’s events.’
On 17 September 1944, after their aircraft had been refuelled and made serviceable, Willie Tait led a formation of sixteen Lancasters out of Yagodnik for the long flight back to Woodhall Spa. Some aircraft were still being repaired and six others were write-offs after the crash-landings, so their crews distributed themselves among the other Lancasters, but one of the sixteen that flew out of Yagodnik that day never made it home. Flying Officer Frank Levy, a tall, dark and serious-minded Rhodesian pilot, inexplicably crashed near the summit of the Rukkedalen Mountains in Norway. He and his crew, together with two members of Squadron Leader Wyness’s crew, who had been hitching a ride home with them, were all killed instantly.
‘To this day I do not know how it happened,’ Tony Iveson said many years later. ‘Because the mountain was only three thousand five hundred feet high. I have never understood why they were in that area anyway – it was well off track – but what was wrong I have no idea.’ When, sixty years after the war, Iveson paid his respects at the graveyard in Nesbyen where all of the men were buried, he found that their graves were still being tended by the villagers.
More Lancasters left Yagodnik on the two following days, the last of them flying out on 20 September. Nick Knilans had been among those who flew home on 17 September, and had he not already made the decision to stand down from ops, his serial mishaps during the Tirpitz raid would have served as a timely reminder of the need to do so. When he landed at Woodhall Spa after his last-ever flight with 617 Squadron, his battered Lancaster was towed away for scrap.
Back at the Petwood Hotel, Knilans stood in the courtyard, stripped naked and burned all his louse-infested clothes, before going inside to take a welcome bath and find a set of clean clothes. He had flown twenty ops with 619 Squadron before joining the Dambusters, and had now completed another thirty ops with 617. He had won the DSO and DFC, and his own countrymen had awarded him their DFC twice and five Air Medals. Willie Tait had also put him up for a Bar to his DSO, but it was vetoed by the Station Commander, probably because of the time Knilans had ‘buzzed’ Petwood Hall while the Group Captain was having his afternoon tea! Knilans had survived fifty ops and brought six of his original seven-man crew through the war alive, but he was the only man of the thirty-two trainees on his pilots’ course to survive the war. After a period of rest, he volunteered to fly American ‘Black Widow’ night-fighters in the Pacific, but the war ended before he could do so.37
Despite the suggestion from aircrew and surveillance flights that the Tirpitz was relatively unscathed after the first raid by 617 Squadron, unknown to them, ‘one bomb had knocked the guts out of it and finished it as a fighting unit for ever.’38 One of the Tallboys, almost certainly Tait’s, had detonated close enough to Tirpitz’s keel to blow a 1,500-square-foot hole in the starboard bow, so large, according to Klaus Rohwedder, that ‘a small motorboat can turn inside’.39 Torrents of seawater flowed into the ship and, together with internal strains and damage from the near-misses, rendered the battleship unseaworthy. German engineers estimated repairs would take nine months, even if no further damage was sustained, but a committee chaired by Admiral Dönitz concluded that the Tirpitz was already beyond repair.40
Rohwedder also testified to the human cost of the attacks on the Tirpitz, his voice cracking as he recalls the horrors:
The military hospital also had a bomb hit and all the doctors were dead. There were just a few paramedics left alive who cared for the wounded. There was no light and the men moaned and howled. They cried for their mothers. That still sticks with me. No one cried for their father. They cried for their mother and … and then … I couldn’t stand it any longer … That day we had one hundred and thirty-two dead people and about three hundred wounded.
The ‘butcher’s bill’ from the repeated attacks on the Tirpitz was something that Rohwedder now knew only too well. ‘It is a gruesome affair,’ he says. ‘The hero’s death was always portrayed as a splendid deed, but how dirty death is and how badly people had to die, I learned on this day.’41
A month after the raid, a surveillance flight by a Mosquito over Altenfjord reported that the Tirpitz had disappeared from its mooring, causing fresh alarms throughout the British high command and a frantic search. Within a few days an aircraft carrying out a recce flight over Norway sighted the battleship off the island of Haakøy in Tromsø Fjord and sent an urgent signal: ‘Tirpitz in Tromsø this afternoon. Big hole in forward deck.’
The gaping hole in the bow – the product of Willie Tait’s direct hit with a Tallboy – had been hastily patched with steel plates and the crippled ship had then been towed at a painfully slow 6 or 7 knots round the coast from Altenfjord. North Sea storms and attacks from British aircraft would have made any attempt to return the ship to Germany for repairs much too risky, and instead it was towed into a sheltered, shallow-water anchorage in Tromsø Fjord. It was now a safer distance from the Russian forces steadily advancing from the east, and though it could not put to sea, its guns could still be used to repel a feared Allied landing in northern Norway.
However, still unaware of the full extent of the damage to the ship, British commanders continued to regard it as a potent threat to the Arctic convoys, and its new location, 120 miles closer to Britain than Altenfjord, had brought it just within the return range of Lancasters flying from RAF Lossiemouth in northern Scotland. A second attack, Operation Obviate, was immediately authorised whenever weather conditions permitted – a severe limitation at Tromsø, which was under semi-permanent cloud cover in the prevailing westerlies and was certain to be cloud-free only in an easterly wind.
CHAPTER 12
‘What Have You Been Doing Today?’
The cre
ws who returned from Yagodnik were soon receiving sad news. Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC, DSO and Bar, DFC and Bar, the leader of the squadron on the legendary Dams raid that had made it immortal, was killed on 19 September 1944 during a raid on Mönchengladbach. A man born to fly, with over 170 missions under his belt, Gibson had been unable to resist the urge to fly on operations once more.
He had been posted to 54 Base as operations officer (a non-operational role), but took advantage of his position to place himself on the battle order that night as ‘Master Bomber’, controlling the whole attack from over the target area – a role for which he had no formal training. There was considerable difficulty marking the target, leading many aircraft to spend longer above it than was desirable. Gibson himself may have circled the target once more after the other aircraft had turned for home. Whether he was hit by flak or fire from a night-fighter, suffered a mechanical failure, made an error because of his unfamiliarity with the Mosquito he was flying, or simply ran out of fuel is unknown, but his aircraft crashed at Steenbergen in the Netherlands at 10.30 that evening, and Gibson was killed instantly.
The Dutch mayor of the town arranged a proper funeral for Gibson and his navigator, Squadron Leader Jim Warwick, DFC, who, as Station Navigation Officer, should not have been flying combat ops either. Winston Churchill paid full tribute to Gibson, ‘the glorious Dam-buster’, in a letter written to his sister: ‘We have lost in this officer one of the most splendid of all our fighting men. His name will not be forgotten; it will be for ever enshrined in the most wonderful records of our country.’1