by John Nichol
The Tirpitz raid had been Tait’s ninety-eighth operational flight. He flew two more to complete his century and was then required to step down from the squadron he had led with such distinction. Larry Curtis had already been stood down by then. His thirty-eighth and final op with 617 Squadron had been the sinking of the Tirpitz, and there could not have been a better note on which to finish. He had flown over seventy bombing ops and – unusually for wireless operators, who often missed out on the medals routinely awarded to pilots, bomb-aimers, navigators and gunners – had been rewarded with a DFC and Bar.
In September 1945, Tait visited Tromsø Fjord. It was the site of his most celebrated achievement but his tone was anything but triumphant. About to be broken up for scrap, the rusting hulk of the Tirpitz was, he said, ‘huge, hideous, and stank like a charnel house. There were nearly a thousand bodies still inside the flooded hull and the treacly black fuel oil still seeped out of the rents … this rusty tomb was nothing to gloat over.’66
Willie Tait’s replacement, John E. Fauquier, was a much-decorated Canadian who had learned his trade as a ‘bush pilot’ in the Northern Territories of Canada and was beginning his third tour of bomber operations when he joined 617. Like Leonard Cheshire before him, Fauquier had also taken a drop in rank in order to return to combat operations. His reputation as ‘a tough, hard Canadian’ had preceded him and, said one 617 crewman, ‘we had awaited his arrival with some trepidation; but nothing changed on 617. If you dropped a clanger you got hit hard, but that’s exactly the way it was under Tait, too.’67
When he was awarded the first of his DSOs, Fauquier’s citation stated that ‘he set an example of the highest order’. Barney Gumbley could verify that. ‘Our new boss is a Canadian,’ he noted in a letter home, ‘and heck he has started with a bang. He uses the big stick to good effect. He is “training” minded and gets us airborne regularly as clockwork. A good thing. It only remains to be seen whether his dictator methods show a dividend.’68
However, the men of 617, always notoriously relaxed when off duty, were horrified to note that the example that the tough Canadian intended to set for his new squadron included a course of compulsory early morning PE. After a few days of half-hearted cooperation, it was a great relief to them all when they were told that they could forget about the PE and get back on ops.
CHAPTER 14
The Last Christmas?
As the winter of 1944 began to bite, Germany’s position grew steadily weaker. As the Soviet advance continued on the Eastern Front, Hitler abandoned his wartime HQ, the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in East Prussia, on 20 November and retreated to his Berlin bunker, from which he was never again to emerge. The disappearance of even the remotest possibility of a German landing in Britain led the Home Guard to be stood down on 3 December, and though the Battle of the Bulge began in the Ardennes on 16 December and raged for five weeks, causing 100,000 casualties to both sides, it would prove to be Hitler’s last real throw of the dice.
For 617 Squadron, the air battles were far from over, but there was a genuine hope among the aircrew that Christmas 1944 would be the last of the war, though any festive cheer was diminished by the events of 21 December, which are seared into Frank Tilley’s mind. The operation he and his crew embarked on was a combined 617 Squadron and Main Force raid on a huge synthetic oil refinery and fuel storage depot at Politz, near Stettin, in north-western Poland. The plant converted bituminous coal into the aviation fuel used by the Luftwaffe. Sixteen 617 Squadron aircraft were to take part in the raid and Tilley was flying with his regular crew in Lancaster T-Tare, piloted by New Zealander Arthur ‘Joppy’ Joplin, who had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday.
Joplin had always wanted to fly, though the realities of warfare had passed him by. ‘My father and uncles had all fought in the Great War,’ he says:
Indeed, things may have turned out very differently for me, as my mother’s then fiancé was killed flying in the RFC! She then met my father after the war. But no one really talked about their experiences and I certainly never considered the dangers. And when the second war started the whole of the British Empire was wound up in the war – it was the way of the world, everyone was in favour of the war effort. Joining up seemed natural.1
After training, Joplin’s was one of only a handful of novice crews sent straight to 617 Squadron. ‘I have no idea why they chose us, I suppose we must have impressed someone during training!’
Arthur Joplin’s crew
On the morning of the Politz raid, Joplin’s regular bomb-aimer, Loftus ‘Lofty’ Hebbard, was in sick quarters with a heavy cold. When Flight Lieutenant Arthur Walker, one of the most experienced bomb-aimers on the squadron, heard about it, he went straight to see Joplin. Arthur needed one final trip to complete a double tour of forty-five operations, so he lobbied Joplin to take the ailing Hebbard’s place. ‘At the time, it seemed totally reasonable to try to get an extra op completed,’ remembers Joplin. ‘And I was very pleased to have such an experienced replacement, so immediately agreed. Looking back now, it’s a decision I’ve always worried about.’ ‘Arthur wanted to do that final trip to get his forty-five,’ Basil Fish says. ‘I suppose if it had been me, I’d probably have wanted to do the same thing.’ Frank Tilley felt the same: ‘At the time, I didn’t really think anything of it,’ he says. ‘It didn’t seem strange at all back then. I just remember he seemed very pleased to be doing his last trip with us.’
All the NCOs like Tilley were housed in thin-walled wooden sheds or Nissen huts, and he remembers that the weather when he woke up on that December day was ‘absolutely filthy, raining, very cold and foggy. A terrible day.’ Spirits rose a little as he and the other NCOs ate their pre-flight breakfast in the Sergeants’ Mess. On a normal day it would have been porridge, but as they were flying, it was bacon, egg and chips with plenty of hot tea.2
After the final briefing, they were taken to their aircraft and fired everything, testing the engines ready to taxi out, but the fog then thickened and the operation was cancelled. They shut everything back down, clambered out and returned to the Flights. Some hours later, even though the fog appeared to be little better, they were told that the op had been reinstated. ‘I wasn’t very happy when they said it was all back on,’ Tilley says. ‘I wondered how the hell we were going to get back on the ground afterwards.’
Sydney Grimes was also ‘a bit apprehensive, but I was every time an op was cancelled and then reinstated. There was a feeling that this was no longer “neat and tidy”. It had been scrubbed for a reason and there was a sense of chancing your luck by starting it all again.’3
The crew bus took Joplin’s crew back out to their aircraft, and they went through their pre-flight preparations again and took off as normal, though it was pitch dark and so foggy that, says Tilley, ‘we just disappeared into the mist’. The op itself was routine. They were not intercepted by night-fighters and, despite poor visibility, some confusion over markers and ‘the usual flak over the target’, the refinery sustained some serious damage and only three Lancasters out of a total force of more than 200 were shot down. Mission completed, 617 and the other squadrons turned for home.
However, the weather in England had deteriorated even more while they had been carrying out the op, and fog was blanketing the country. Benny Goodman was told to try to get into Woodhall Spa, where they had just fitted the ‘Drem’ airfield landing system, named after an RAF airfield in Scotland – shrouded lights on ten-foot poles, hidden in hedges and bushes to make them hard for enemy reconnaissance aircraft to spot. The lights were only visible to aircraft in the circuit around the airfield, and could be dimmed to hide them from enemy aircraft. A returning pilot had to fly round the circuit until he saw the lead-in lights – the flare path leading to the runway – which were only visible once an aircraft was on its final approach. It was a brand-new system and Goodman had never used it before. ‘But it was that or nothing,’ he says. ‘All I could see was the glow through the fog, not the runway itself,
but I managed to get it down. Once we landed, it was so foggy I couldn’t actually see in front of me to taxi anywhere, so I just pulled off to one side of the runway and shut the aircraft down!’4
When Joppy Joplin’s crew reached the coast ‘it all started to get a bit grim. The fuel state on our aircraft wasn’t all that marvellous and everything was clamped down with thick fog.’ In such conditions, Drem or no Drem, he felt there was no possibility of finding, let alone landing at Woodhall Spa, and he decided to make for Ludford Magna instead which, though it had a much shorter runway, at least had a FIDO – Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation – system: twin pipelines alongside the runway through which petrol was pumped and ignited, creating walls of flame whose heat dispersed the fog and whose light could be seen from a considerable distance … in theory at least. ‘You were confronted with two rows of flames either side of the runway which effectively lifted the fog,’ Frank Tilley says. ‘The pilot flew into this tunnel, apparently of clear air, but it was quite spectacular. It was like flying into hell!’ However, on this night the fog remained almost impenetrable – so thick that they ‘couldn’t see past the nose or the wing tips’ – and the light of the flames was almost completely obscured.
However, there were 200 other bomber crews airborne that night and looking for a place to land, and when Joplin radioed to get permission to land, ‘so were what sounded like about a hundred others. The air was just jammed with people desperate to land,’ Tilley says. ‘It was very worrying to hear all this going on. We knew things were looking bad for a lot of people.’
They no longer had enough fuel to divert to a Scottish airfield, where visibility was much better. Getting lower and lower on fuel and with no communication from the ground, they kept circling around Ludford Magna, when suddenly there was ‘a terrific bang’ and when Tilley shot a glance out of the port side, he saw that the wing just outside the outer engine was bent upwards by 90 degrees and knew at once that they were in serious trouble. ‘The engine gauges were spinning back and forward and the aircraft was juddering and shaking,’ he says, ‘and the revs were up and down all over the place.’ Joplin yelled: ‘Full power! Full power!’ and Tilley ‘pushed everything through the gate’ but nothing happened. ‘I remember radioing “T-Tare crashing! T-Tare crashing!”’ says Joplin. ‘And I just managed to tell the crew to get to their crash stations. After that, I remember nothing. It all went black.’
Whether the bomb-aimer, Arthur Walker, heard the order is not clear, but instead of making for his designated ditching station at the rear of the aircraft, he went forward into the bomb-aimer’s compartment. ‘I knew we were going down,’ Tilley says. ‘Basil [Fish, the navigator] and I headed for our ditching station between the main spar and the rear spar. I dived over the spar and the next minute we hit the ground with a terrific bang. I was very lucky to get over just as we impacted. If not, I would have been catapulted clean out the front of the aircraft and certainly would have died.’
They heard the prolonged squeal of tortured metal as the aircraft ground to a juddering halt. The thunder of the engines ceased abruptly, but a moment later there was a whoosh! and a roar as the spilling fuel ignited. Tilley remembers seeing the flames as he tried to get up, but he couldn’t move at first because his parachute harness had snagged on something. Fortunately he didn’t panic and twisted and hammered at the release buckle until it came free. As he got up, he ‘wobbled and collapsed again’ and realised his leg was broken. Holding on to the fuselage, he dragged himself back to his feet and saw his friend Basil standing dazed and clutching his head. Tilley brought him to his senses, shouting, ‘Come on Basil, we’ve got to get out of here!’
As the aircraft filled with smoke, Tilley groped his way to his designated escape hatch in the roof and freed it. ‘I have no idea how I climbed out the hatch,’ he says. ‘My broken leg didn’t hurt at that point, it just felt spongy and wouldn’t respond, but I knew that I’d die if I stayed in that burning aircraft, so survival instincts took over. I had to get out. I had to get up a couple of times, hop towards the hatch, and somehow pull myself out.’
He slithered and fell over the side of the fuselage, crashed to the ground and began to crawl away from the burning aircraft. ‘To my shame,’ he says, ‘I didn’t spend much time checking on the others. I know I couldn’t have done anything with my broken leg, but it still plays on my mind to this day. I still wonder if I could have done more.’ As he recalls the incident seventy years later, sitting in his home, surrounded by RAF memorabilia, his eyes fill with tears and he falls silent.
Basil Fish had been knocked unconscious by a blow to his head as the aircraft crash-landed. ‘I remember coming to with my feet trapped and blood gushing from my head,’ he recalls. ‘I was trapped in a burning aircraft and any man who says he wouldn’t be scared in those circumstances is a fool or a liar! But what was I to do? You have to do something, you can’t just sit and wait.’
Groggy and with blood pouring from his head wound, he struggled to extricate himself from the aircraft, and was violently sick as soon as he got out. ‘The scene around me was just unreal,’ he says, ‘a burning aircraft, injured people, it really was a terrible situation.’ Ignoring his own problems and the danger from exploding ammunition as it detonated in the heat, he stumbled to the cockpit and found Joplin still in his pilot’s seat, with both legs broken and tangled up in the rudder pedals. Fish lifted Joplin out, hearing the crunch of broken bones as he pulled him free of his seat. ‘I dragged him out,’ Fish says, ‘but he was a dead weight and I have no idea how I managed it. I’m not a strong fellow at all, so it must have been the adrenalin flowing – in those situations, you just do what you have to, don’t you? I can still hear Joppy’s bones cracking as I moved him, it really was an awful noise.’
He put Joplin down on the other side of the aircraft to Tilley. ‘We shouted to each other,’ Tilley says, ‘checking up on each other, but there wasn’t much to say.’
Fish returned to the aircraft to try to rescue the mid-upper gunner, Bob Yates, and the bomb-aimer, Arthur Walker, but was driven back by the ferocious heat, though he glimpsed their charred bodies through the flames. ‘They were clearly dead and I couldn’t get to them anyway,’ Fish says. ‘It was just a mangled wreck and a furnace of flames.’ By a cruel irony, Walker’s forty-fifth op to complete his two tours had proved to be his last in every sense.
The rear gunner, Flight Sergeant Jim Thompson, had survived the crash, thrown clear when his gun turret was sheared off by the impact, but he had fractured his spine and was stumbling around in agony. The radio operator, ‘Cookie’ Cooke, had banged his head against his wireless as the plane crashed, fracturing his skull. Although badly dazed, he had also managed to escape, but his smouldering Mae West was burning his wrists and Fish helped him take it off.
The survivors ‘were stuck in that freezing field’ for about three and a half hours. Tilley remembers:
There was Joppy over one side. Cookie was wandering round in delirium, because the bang on the head had really brained him, and he’d also burnt his hand. Tommy was wandering around as well, holding his back. And I couldn’t go very far on one leg, so I just lay there watching the aircraft burn. That was an awful sight. She had seen us through all those battles and here she was dying. It was, without doubt, the worst time of my life.
The aircraft had crashed in farmland several miles from Ludford Magna, and in the thick fog there was little chance of rescuers finding them quickly, so Basil Fish – though concussed, the only one capable of walking – set off across the field. The fog was so dense that he could barely see where he was placing his feet, let alone what lay around him, and with no stars nor any trace of visible light, he had no idea in which direction to head. He set off blundering across ploughed fields and through hedges, stumbling and falling repeatedly, his head throbbing and blood seeping steadily from his scalp wound. ‘It was a terrible journey,’ he says. ‘I was injured myself and didn’t know where the hell I was going
. I just knew I had badly wounded friends waiting for help. I was the only one who could do anything and it was the thought of my crew that spurred me on; they would have done the same for me.’
He covered some 3 miles before eventually finding a narrow track leading to an isolated farmhouse. The building was in darkness but he hammered on the door and woke the sleeping farmer. There was no telephone, but the farmer, lighting the way with a Tilley lamp, escorted him to the nearby village, where there was a telephone box. Fish first had to convince the operator that it was an emergency and not an excuse to avoid putting twopence in the slot. She grudgingly put him through to the nearest RAF base, Ludford Magna. He passed on his location, and soon afterwards an ambulance and ‘a team of squaddies with stretchers’ arrived to begin the rescue.
Fish told them what he could about the length of time he’d been walking and the terrain he had crossed and they began to search for the crash site. Eventually, after repeatedly blowing ‘SOS’ on whistles as they combed the muddy fields and lanes, they heard a faint answering whistle, and hurrying on through the fog they at last saw the glow of the still-burning aircraft. After initial assessment and treatment of the injured where they lay, Joplin, Tilley and Cooke were taken to the civilian County Infirmary at Louth, while Fish and Thompson – the latter’s fractured spine not yet diagnosed – went to the base sick quarters at Ludford Magna, where they were given pain-killers and hotwater bottles, and put to bed. Thompson’s spinal fracture was only discovered during a more thorough examination the next day, and he was then transferred to the RAF’s specialist injuries unit at Rauceby.