by John Nichol
Because of the propaganda value the Nazis might have made from it, Gibson’s death was not officially announced until 5 January 1945, but the RAF grapevine had spread the news to 617 Squadron almost at once, and those who had flown with him, whether or not they liked him, were united in respect for the skill, courage and leadership he had shown when commanding the squadron to its most famous achievement.
Frank Tilley
Before they could return to the task of finishing off the Tirpitz in that autumn of 1944, the men of 617 Squadron were first tasked with making two other major raids, one a return to the scene of the squadron’s worst disaster: the Dortmund–Ems Canal. That op was set for 23 September 1944, less than a week after they had returned from the first attack on the Tirpitz. Squadron Leader Wyness had lost two of his regular crew in the crash in the Norwegian mountains that killed all of Flying Officer Frank Levy’s crew, and one of the replacements was a twenty-one-year-old flight engineer, Frank Tilley, who had never flown on a night operation before and was told only that afternoon that he would be flying with Wyness. ‘It was my first night trip and everything seemed more forbidding,’ he says. ‘I felt very apprehensive about it. I preferred day to night; I felt much happier if I could see out!’2
Tilley, a Londoner with a roguish smile and a chirpy manner, had only joined 617 the previous month. He had worked at an engineering firm on London’s Whitechapel Road after leaving school, and his first direct experience of the war had come in mid-1940 when he was seventeen. The Germans bombed the docks, and sheltering in the basement, he saw the bombers flying over, heard the explosions, saw the flames coming up and the raging fires. ‘It was quite scary,’ he says. ‘We just hoped they wouldn’t bomb us! Eventually they did bomb the factory and that was my job there finished!’
Tilley didn’t think that much about the war at first, even though several of his friends enlisted. ‘Some really wanted to get stuck in,’ he says, ‘but I didn’t feel that way in the early days, I don’t think I was very mature and felt quite young even at seventeen. But eventually I succumbed to the tremendous propaganda – the RAF, especially the bombers, were really glamorised – and I thought I needed to be part of it all.’ He was working for a company manufacturing artificial limbs at the time – always a growth business in wartime, but ‘a very boring job’, he says. It was a reserved occupation and he could not enlist in the normal way, but he discovered that if he volunteered for RAF aircrew then he could be released to fight. ‘I had no idea about the huge aircrew losses,’ Tilley says, ‘though logic should have made me ask, “Why is it so easy to volunteer as bomber aircrew?” and wonder what had happened to all the others from the previous years, but of course you didn’t think about that back then!’
Tilley trained as a flight engineer, and at the end of his training he assembled in a hangar with the other new flight engineers, facing a line of officers, who began calling out, ‘We need ten people for Sunderlands’ – the flying boats mainly used on anti-U-boat patrols by Coastal Command. ‘There was a mad rush,’ Tilley says. ‘Clearly, the others had realised the dangers of flying bombers!’
The officers then asked for volunteers for other aircraft, and Tilley found it ‘rather thought-provoking’ that the largest numbers of volunteers were required for the Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings used by Bomber Command. He volunteered for Lancasters mainly because he liked the look of the aircraft, and was accepted at once. ‘I suppose I must have realised by then that it was a more dangerous option,’ he says, ‘but I think I wanted to be at the forefront of it all.’
He joined New Zealander Arthur ‘Joppy’ Joplin’s crew simply because Joplin walked straight up to him and asked him to. ‘I’ve no idea why,’ Tilley says, ‘but that was it. The relationship with the crew was one hundred per cent important. If you didn’t get on, then you were in serious trouble, but in fact Joppy was a wonderful pilot and a wonderful captain, and got on with everybody. So I was now part of a crew which would live or die together.’
He became very good friends with the crew’s navigator, Basil Fish. ‘He had his dad’s car,’ Tilley says, ‘a dark blue, two-door Ford Eight, and we used to sneak out to the squadron in the middle of the night and pinch petrol for it so we could get around! We all used to cram into it for a night out in Boston. Before then I didn’t drink or anything, I was quite innocent really, but Basil introduced me to Black and Tan and I never looked back!’
‘Every boy in the world wanted to fly,’ remembers Basil Fish,3 not least because being aircrew ‘didn’t hurt when you went to a dance on a Saturday night. You were hoping some girl would ask, “What have you been doing today?” so you could say, “Oh, I’ve been dicing with death up in the heavens”!’
‘We were popular with the girls,’ Frank Tilley says:
most of us aircrew were. One particular girl took a real shine to Joppy – he was the good-looking one – and being a New Zealander made him an extra special catch! We used to go to The Gliderdrome in Boston, a skating rink turned into a dance hall. They would have a band and it ended up as our regular place to go after the pub. Looking back now, it’s curious to think of us dancing and socialising then heading off next day to drop bombs, destroy buildings, probably kill people. But we didn’t think like that then – it just didn’t cross our minds.
As they trained on the Lancaster, the stories from front-line crews about going on ops, flak and being shot up by fighters made them realise that ‘we were heading towards hell when we started ops,’ Tilley says, ‘but we didn’t want to let anyone down, and we certainly didn’t talk about fears or worries.’
Their skipper, Arthur Joplin, who had joined the war effort ‘to be part of it all, to experience the excitement’, agrees that any fears simply didn’t seem to surface. ‘I don’t think we ever really talked as a crew about the dangers of flying in Bomber Command,’ he says from his home in Auckland. ‘And I certainly didn’t think too much about it all – we just lived life as it came along. And to the full! I was more concerned with ensuring I managed each op correctly – there was so much to do and to learn, everything was very new and you really had to concentrate to ensure you kept on top of everything.’
With Joplin and the rest of his crew, Tilley was posted to 617 Squadron on 15 August 1944, but says that at the time ‘617 was just another number to me. They weren’t regarded as a heroic squadron or anything, just a “special duties” squadron. I’d heard about the Dams raid, but it wasn’t big folklore in the RAF, I didn’t even associate 617 with it, and in fact we didn’t even call it “the Dams raid”, it was just another op, and the term “Dambusters” didn’t exist until well after the war when the film came out.’ Tilley’s memory may be at fault on that point, for the Daily Mirror’s headline on 27 May 1943 was ‘Dam-buster Gibson to get VC’. But Joplin remembers events differently: ‘I didn’t have a clue about 617 Squadron back then! Back in NZ training I don’t even remember hearing about the Dams raid.’ Tilley’s crewmate, Loftus ‘Lofty’ Hebbard, had a rather more jaundiced view of their new unit. After having a scout around, he commented to his crew, ‘It looks like we have been posted to that suicide squadron.’4
Frank Tilley was about to have a worrying introduction to 617 ops, and his apprehension about the Dortmund–Ems op would have increased had he known what had happened on the previous raid on the canal in 1943. Perhaps fortunately, he had ‘no idea at all that just a year before, five out of eight aircraft had been shot down there, but I shall remember the trip as long as I live; it was dreadful.’ Because the canal was such a ‘hot’, well-defended target, 617’s raid was timed so that they flew out alongside a large contingent of Main Force bombers that were targeting the city of Dortmund. The sheer numbers of other aircraft gave 617 Squadron some cover from prowling night-fighters, but even so, Wyness’s Lancaster was attacked by fighters several times, both on the approach to the target and after turning for home.
Unlike Tilley, the other members of the crew were very experienced and res
ponded to the attacks with well-drilled coolness. Tilley had no idea that they were even under threat until he suddenly heard the rear gunner’s urgent call, ‘Corkscrew port skipper!’ An instant later, as the Lancaster began its vicious, twisting dive, Tilley saw tracer flashing across the top of the aircraft. ‘I could see it clear as day. It was a constant stream of green tracer and those bullets spelt death. I can still see it today,’ he says, holding out his hands to show the tremor that has started in them as he recalls the incident seventy years later from the comfort of his study ain his home in leafy Hertfordshire.
Wyness had to corkscrew several times to shake off fighters. ‘I had no part to play in it,’ Tilley says. ‘I mean, he’d got the control column, I hadn’t. It was up to the gunners and the pilot. I just clung on because when you dive you almost float off the floor, but then, when he rolls and starts climbing, you’re crushed back down.’
The attack lasted about two or three minutes but ‘it felt like a lifetime’. Tilley had experienced the realities of battle previously and says ‘there was nothing to do but monitor the instruments and stare at the tracer searing through the surrounding darkness’. ‘I was transfixed by it,’ he says, ‘and by seeing other Lancasters going down in flames.’
It was a shocking realisation. In that moment I realised what the war, Bomber Command, the flying, all meant. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that. In the total blackness, you’d suddenly see a ball of flame which got bigger and bigger, and then just descended gently downwards to the earth. Knowing that it was a Lancaster with at least seven people dying in front of your eyes was truly awful – it’s an image that I carry with me to this day – and it went on and on, perhaps eleven times altogether. At the time I suppose I just thought, ‘Thank God it’s not me,’ but I find myself thinking about it more now, and understanding much more what it meant. Some years after the war, a friend described me and the other bomber aircrews as ‘just cannon fodder’. I took exception to that at the time, but I suppose he was right. Just like the trenches in the First World War, you knew that a lot of you wouldn’t be coming back.
Only one of the Lancasters shot down that night was from 617 Squadron, with the loss of three lives, the remainder being Main Force aircraft, and this time, unlike their previous raid on the Dortmund–Ems Canal, their bombing was accurate, destroying part of the embankment. Ten miles of the canal were completely drained of water, leaving twenty-three barges high and dry and flooding the surrounding countryside. A workforce of 4,000 men laboured for weeks to repair the breaches that had appeared along 2 miles of its length, but the canal remained unusable for the remainder of the war.5 The one major blot on 617 Squadron’s record had now been erased.
Frank Tilley was never more glad to see the runway lights at Woodhall Spa than he was that night, but if he was expecting some acknowledgement of the baptism of fire by flak and night-fighter he had been through, Squadron Leader Wyness was to disappoint him. After they’d landed, Wyness merely said, ‘Oh, well done, Engineer. What was our fuel consumption?’
‘Well, heck, I told him,’ Tilley says with a rueful smile, ‘and he just said, “Thank you very much,” and that was that – my first experience of a night operation.’
* * *
Despite the failure of Operation Market Garden – the heroic but doomed attempt by airborne troops to seize the bridge at Arnhem – Allied successes had continued during the early autumn. Brest, Boulogne and Calais all fell to the Allies by the end of September 1944, while on the Eastern Front, Soviet forces advanced through Yugoslavia and Hungary. In mid-September, Sir Arthur Harris had been formally released from his orders to support the invasion and Bomber Command reverted to Air Ministry control as attacks by Main Force resumed on German industrial targets. In October, 17,000 sorties were flown, 13,000 of which were to targets in Germany during which 50,000 tons of bombs were dropped. On 14 and 15 October, Bomber Command attacked Duisburg with thousand-bomber raids that dropped the same weight of bombs in less than forty-eight hours as the Germans had dropped on London throughout the war. The Duisburg official archive details local reports of the time saying, ‘Very serious property damage. A large number of people are buried. All mines and coke ovens lay silent.’6
Meanwhile, 617 Squadron continued its attacks into the heart of Nazi Germany by day and night, and although the war may have been approaching its endgame, the dangers were still all too real.
* * *
‘Heads!’ Bruce Hosie – a New Zealander who was still only twenty-one but already the veteran of seventy-two ops, forty-seven of them with 617 Squadron – was spinning a coin with another wireless operator to decide who would fill a vacant seat in Drew Wyness’s Lancaster. It was 7 October 1944 and Wyness’s regular w/op had an ear infection and couldn’t fly, so Hosie and the other w/op were competing for the role. The other man called correctly, earning himself the day off and committing Hosie to a raid on the Kembs barrage, something of a poisoned chalice, and an even more difficult and heavily defended target than the Dortmund–Ems Canal.
Born in the farming town of Mania, Taranaki, Hosie was barely eighteen when he left the family home to join up. His uncles and father were veterans of the First World War, and with the heavy losses suffered in the trenches, there was a certain amount of dread within the family as their only son departed. But, despite the dangers of continuous ops over Germany, Bruce proved to have a lucky streak – he was in the sick-bay when his original crew on 617 Squadron was shot down over Munich. Tall and blond, Hosie enjoyed the social life on the squadron, and his diary reveals regular trips to the watering holes of Lincoln both with his crew and with a number of girlfriends. But he also missed his family and home, and there are countless entries detailing the letters he wrote to his loved ones, and the precious notes received in return. On the day he lost the toss, he had already completed the equivalent of almost three Bomber Command tours and could easily have opted to be repatriated to his homeland. But, like so many others before him, he was dedicated to the fight and, in the aftermath of D-Day, was determined to see the war won.7
The Kembs barrage, close to the Swiss–German border a few miles north of Basel, was part a hydroelectric scheme, but its huge sluice gates also controlled the flow of the Rhine, maintaining it as a navigable waterway. As US commanders planned the crossing of the Rhine, they were haunted by the fear that the Nazis would deliberately destroy the barrage, creating a cataclysmic flood that would sweep away the American assault troops and pontoon bridges as they crossed the Rhine further north. Thirteen Lancasters from 617 Squadron were therefore tasked with making a pre-emptive strike, aiming to destroy the barrage and release the pent-up waters long before the US troops reached the banks of the river. The ensuing devastating flooding would instead create chaos among German units moving to defend the Rhine. The final briefing for the op contained one significant warning: a heavily defended powerhouse lay just to the north-west of the target and crews were warned to avoid its flak batteries at all costs.
It was felt that a daylight raid would give the maximum chance of success, and three squadrons of Mustangs were detailed to provide fighter cover. The Lancasters were divided into two groups. Seven Lancasters, led by Squadron Leader Gerry Fawke, would bomb from 7,000 feet, with the aim of distracting the air defences. Meanwhile, the remaining six, led by Willie Tait, would sweep in at low level in three pairs to attack the barrage. They were using delay-fused Tallboys both to stop smoke and debris from the previous bombs obscuring the target, and to avoid being hit by the blast or shrapnel from their own weapons.
However, the plan’s chances of success rested on some dangerous assumptions, not least that the German air defences would not be alerted by reports of a flight of Lancaster bombers turning down the Rhine at the Swiss border, even though the Kembs barrage was the first and by far the most significant target in their path. Even more worrying, all the aircrews were very well aware that Lancasters making a low-level daylight attack against a well-defended t
arget would be extremely vulnerable to flak and ground fire, and most had serious misgivings. They would be approaching the target at around 600 feet, an altitude that one pilot described as ‘madness – ideal for an [enemy] machine gunner’.8
The day before the op, Tony Iveson had lunch with Drew Wyness, Bruce Hosie and Colonel Chris Melville, ‘the Commanding Officer of the King’s Own Scottish Borderer’s – they had been training in Scotland for mountain warfare, and were a very tough bunch! He drove us back in his jeep, and dropped Drew and me at our aircraft. As he left we arranged to see him for drinks after the op next day. We all thought the war was going well and were looking forward to a conclusion soon.’9
The Mustangs linked up with the Lancasters over Dungeness after an afternoon take-off on 7 October 1944, and the flight to the target, in fine, sunny conditions, was peaceful enough. Flight Lieutenant Phil Martin had joined 617 from 61 Squadron, where he had been awarded his first DFC for completing thirty missions, and his navigator recalled ‘as we ambled along, quite low down, seeing a farmer and his cows, each with a bell around its neck, crossing a bridge. I have never seen cows with bells on, only in books. Quite a peaceful scene, soon to be forgotten in the next few minutes!’
The weather was touch and go nearer the target, but the barrage itself was clear of cloud below bombing height and visibility was good. The low force did their planned dog-leg as Squadron Leader Gerry Fawke’s group climbed to bombing height, meeting only minor flak. From the target 3 miles ahead, Willie Tait could see heavy fire being directed at Fawke’s formation, followed by a series of splashes as their Tallboys struck the river.
The Mustangs dived out of the sun and began shooting up the flak batteries in an attempt to divert their fire from the low-level bombers, but the fire from the air defences was much heavier than expected and, though none of the attackers had been shot down so far, their luck could not hold indefinitely. Exactly on H-hour, Tait’s Lancaster dived out of the 1,500-foot cloud base and levelled off at 500 feet. He could see explosions and eruptions like waterspouts as the high-level force’s Tallboys detonated. He thought for a moment that the flak-gunners had not seen him, but then lines of white tracer seared upwards from the east bank of the river. All traces of the bomb-bursts from the high-level force had now disappeared, but there appeared to be no damage to the target, with all of the sluices still closed and no cascade of water.