by John Nichol
After initial treatment at Louth that night, the RAF reclaimed the others ‘in one of their bone-shaking ambulances’ and also took them to Rauceby.
Arthur Joplin had been isolated from his friends at Louth and, as no one had told him otherwise, was in the tragic position of believing his full crew had survived the crash. ‘On my way, the ambulance crew stopped to check up on me,’ he says.
The conversation turned to the crash and I said to them, ‘At least we all got out.’ I remember to this day they turned to look at each other without saying a word. I could see from their faces something was wrong, but they clearly didn’t want to tell me what. I pressed them and eventually they told me that both Bob Yates and Arthur Walker had been killed. My whole world collapsed around me – a hole could have opened up and I would gladly have climbed in. I’d spent the last few days thinking how lucky we had all been to escape. Now I had the shattering news that two of my dear friends were dead. As their skipper, I was responsible. It was a terrible time.
* * *
Recalling the events from his retirement home in Auckland, the loss and responsibility – even though there was seemingly nothing he could have done – clearly still weigh heavily on Arthur, and his voice falters and dies at the distressing memories.
Frank Tilley’s memories of the experience also still loom large. ‘I was in the crash ward for a couple of days,’ he says with a shudder:
seeing sights that you wouldn’t want to see again: chaps with no arms, no legs, terribly burnt and dragging themselves around. I was badly injured but this was a real eye-opener. It was the first time I’d really seen, understood, what war meant. It wasn’t a nice revelation. One guy’s face was burnt off and his bones were sticking through the ends of his fingers – I often wonder what happened to him. But I just wanted to get the hell out of it, and that was actually the end of my flying career. I didn’t fly any more because by the time I’d come out of convalescence the war was over.
While still being treated for their injuries after the crash, Joppy Joplin and Basil Fish were subjected to hostile interviews by senior officers investigating the incident. They concluded that Joplin had been negligent in not adhering to standard regulations governing the approach to the airfield – regulations that were routinely ignored by all pilots, even in clear visibility and with ample fuel in their tanks. Joplin and Fish were both reprimanded and had their logbooks endorsed. ‘I thought it was pretty bloody unfair to be given a red endorsement, to be honest,’ Fish says. ‘It hurt to be held responsible for the crash and of course the deaths.’
‘We all thought it quite unfair,’ Tilley adds.
I remember after the war, Joppy was very reluctant to come to a reunion we had in New Zealand. He thought everyone might blame him for the deaths of the other crew, but of course no one did; it was just a tragedy of war. It played on my mind for a long time though – it still does, especially not being able to do anything to help. It’s there all the time really … I still think about that. I realise I couldn’t do anything, but you can’t help wondering.
The night after flying on the Politz op, Ken Gill, the navigator on Barney Gumbley’s crew, sat by his bed to write a letter to his parents. ‘Last night we were doing a spot of work in the Baltic,’ he said. ‘That makes our sixth towards our twenty so we are coming along slowly. I’m afraid I shan’t be seeing you again this Xmas so I’ll have to do without my [Christmas] dinner. I’m hoping to see you in January.’5
It would be a truly sad Christmas for Arthur Joplin’s crew too, and the New Year would not bring more cheer for 617 Squadron.
* * *
Tony Iveson was on leave over Christmas 1944 and ‘saw all the newsreels on the attack in the Ardennes, but by the time we got back to the squadron, that was all over. I think we knew that the war was on its way out, but it still wasn’t over and there were still things to be done. The Russians were approaching the German frontier and we knew it was only a matter of time; it really depended on how long the Germans decided to hold on.’
The first raid of the New Year, on 12 January 1945, saw 617 Squadron tasked with a further attack on naval targets, this time the U-boat pens, German ships and a floating dock at Bergen in Occupied Norway. The Nazi Kriegsmarine had now lost its U-boat bases on the Atlantic coast and in Belgium, but from Bergen the U-boats were still menacing the crucial Arctic convoys to Archangel and Murmansk. There had been snow the previous day and soldiers had to be brought in to clear the runway at Woodhall Spa.
‘Usually a [snow]fall means that all crews are put on chipping ice off the aircraft before they can become airborne,’ Barney Gumbley wrote, ‘but the snow feels very dry and doesn’t cling at all. Easily comes off when the motors start up.’ However, 12 January dawned very cold but bright and clear. The squadron was again strengthened by Lancasters from 9 Squadron and given an escort of Mustangs flown by Polish pilots. Three Lancasters were detailed to attack the dock and six more the ships, while the remainder of the bomber force would target the U-boat pens.
As well as submarines, the hardened concrete U-boat pens were also used to house E-boats – high-speed torpedo boats that emerged at night to lay mines and sink ships supplying the Allied land forces, then returned to their pens before daybreak. Their speed – faster than any Allied craft – small size and the cover of darkness made them almost invulnerable to attack when at sea, and the pens that housed them were formidable structures, with an 8-foot-thick concrete roof that was impervious to normal bombs … but then Tallboys were not normal bombs.
After crossing the Lincolnshire coast, the gunners tested their weapons, firing short bursts into the grey waters, then settled down for the long, cold flight across the North Sea. The gunners were huddled in their heated flying suits, but the rest of the crew could use the heat from the engines to warm the cabin and did not need them. The wireless operator controlled the flow of heat and, as Tony Iveson recalled with a chuckle, ‘he always complained about “frying, roasting, baking”, whilst, further from the heat source, we kept asking him to turn it up.’6
The pilots flew in radio silence, leaving most of the flying to ‘George’ – the automatic pilot – until they approached the Norwegian coast. When they arrived at the target they found it partly hidden by ground haze, which was made worse when the first crew to bomb dropped their Tallboy. It ‘threw up a huge cloud of muck and dust’ which, in the still, absolutely windless conditions, acted like a dense smokescreen, obscuring the target for the rest. The Mustangs had disappeared to attack the ground defences, leaving the Lancasters circling over the target for half an hour, vulnerable not only to flak but to marauding German fighters. ‘If we could not see the target,’ Iveson said, ‘and with no wind, there was no prospect of getting a clear view, what were we doing there?’7
After no fewer than ten unsuccessful runs, Phil Martin radioed Johnny Fauquier and was given permission to switch to the one target he could see, a merchant ship steaming up the bay, but as the warning light illuminated on the bombsight, signalling five seconds to automatic release, there was ‘an almighty crash’, mixed with a sound like ‘hundreds of coins being thrown against the fuselage floor’. The Tallboy dropped harmlessly into the sea, with half of its tail blown away. An 88mm shell had made a direct hit on the bomb-bay, but fortunately for the crew, the Tallboy had absorbed the full force of the explosion without itself detonating and had deflected most of the shrapnel harmlessly away through the bomb-bay doors, which were now riddled with holes. The aircraft’s systems were still functioning and Martin was able to return safely to base.
Tony Iveson’s crew were also still circling over the target when his rear gunner suddenly shouted, ‘We’ve got fighters, Skipper.’ The next moment the Lancaster was being riddled with cannon fire from a Focke-Wulf Fw 190. ‘I was conscious of streams of white light going overhead and around me,’ Iveson said, ‘and then the aircraft juddering. You could hear the shells crashing into the aircraft, and the tailplane and fin had practically dis
appeared on the port side.’ An engine caught fire, normally fatal to an aircraft, especially when the seat of the blaze is close to the fuel tanks, and Iveson gave the precautionary order ‘Stand by to abandon aircraft’, as he and the flight engineer went through their well-practised drills.
As he did so, ‘the Fw 190 did an upward roll right in front of me; I almost heard it, it was so close. We jettisoned the Tallboy but we were in real danger of the fighters finishing us off, and I headed back towards the flak, thinking they might not follow us into the flak. My training just took over; I had practised and prepared for the worst, and when it happened I was ready for it.’
They were still trailing flames and smoke and ‘looking rather tattered’, and the aircraft was almost unsteerable. Iveson’s leg was shaking with the strain of holding the rudder pedal, and the bomb-aimer, Frank Chance, lashed a rope around the pedal to ease the pressure. They had lost the intercom, and when Chance went back to check on the rest of the crew, he found ‘three hats on the rear step of the Lancaster and the door open’. The two gunners and the wireless operator had baled out.
All aircrew knew the drill if it became necessary to abandon their aircraft, but very few ever practised it, and one squadron CO regarded it as less important than his men being ‘clean and pressed’, in case they were taken prisoner. Murray Vagnolini’s CO on 61 Squadron had greeted him with the words, ‘Welcome to the squadron. Just remember this: while you’re here I expect you to have a short haircut, be well washed and shaved, clean underwear and well-pressed trousers. I tell you this because we are all likely to be shot down at some time and that’s how I expect you to be received by the enemy.’ Vagnolini shakes his head at the memory. ‘He didn’t want us going over to prison camp with dirty underwear!’8
Vagnolini and his crewmates did take one particular precaution before each op, but it had nothing to do with flight safety: ‘We’d always check before heading off to see which pubs actually had beer in stock ready for our return,’ he says with a grin. ‘Sometimes they’d run out or it was rationed. We didn’t want to get caught, as our first priority after returning from an op was to head to the pub and down a few beers to celebrate surviving another raid!’
They did sometimes talk about what might happen if they were shot down and they knew of errors that had been made in the heat of a battle. ‘If the skipper shouted “Prepare to bale out,” we’d heard that a number of crew simply jumped at that point,’ he says. ‘A couple of friends I knew had been lost over Germany when their aircraft actually made it home! We didn’t want to make that mistake, so we practised reacting to the right orders.’
Unlike some of their peers, Tony Iveson’s men had practised their drills for abandoning the aircraft, but under the stress of actual combat, just as Vagnolini had noted, three of Iveson’s men had mistaken the order. All three landed safely but were captured and became PoWs.
While his colleagues were floating down beneath their parachutes, flight engineer John ‘Taff’ Phillips went to the back of the aircraft, found some loose ends of the control cables and lashed them together so that Iveson regained some control of the aircraft. However, looking through the astrodome, Phillips could see ‘part of the tailplane flapping and part of the rudder had a bloody great hole in it’.
‘If the fin had fallen off then we would have gone straight down,’ Iveson said, ‘but I didn’t give any thought to baling out – there was an awful lot of ocean between Bergen and the Shetlands.’
Fauquier was still telling his men to continue orbiting the target, waiting for the smoke and dust to clear, but, said Iveson, ‘by that time I was not interested in the target. My only option, flying a crippled aeroplane with a jettisoned bomb, on three engines, with a fire-damaged wing and tailplane shot to bits, lacking a rear gunner and with no top turret anyway, was to get the hell out of it.’
Meanwhile, John Pryor’s Lancaster had been attacked by two German fighters, and with one engine silenced, two others badly damaged, and the gun turret disabled, he began to search for a suitable place to crash-land. However, the terrain was so rugged that he decided it was out of the question and instead tried to gain as much height as possible so his crew could bale out. Over the intercom he gave the order: ‘Cancel the crash-landing order! Cancel the crash-landing order! Prepare to abandon aircraft! Repeat. Prepare to abandon aircraft!’ but he was struggling to get his Lancaster ‘G’ for George to gain enough height.9
One of the German fighters then flew very close alongside and, Pryor says, ‘was making signs to me to bale out’. It was a notably humane gesture, for many fighter pilots would simply have continued to fire into the bomber. He flew off but then came back to make a dummy attack, before gesticulating again. Pryor told his navigator: ‘I think that bod is trying to tell us that if we don’t land he will shoot us down,’ but he had ‘no intention of presenting the Germans with a Lanc, not even a shot-up one’.
They fired off a couple of red distress flares, hoping to convince the fighter pilot that they were about to bale out, and Pryor managed to coax the Lancaster up to 700 feet, as much as the engines would give him. ‘Get ready to leave when I give the word,’ he told his crew. ‘No hesitation and don’t impede the man behind you. Don’t rush things when you are out and don’t count the usual two before you pull the cord.’ Had they completed the usual count, they would have hit the ground before their chutes had fully opened.
He turned the aircraft to seaward and waited until they were approaching a large island before saying ‘Go!’ One by one they baled out, but determined not to let G for George fall into enemy hands, Pryor waited until he was ‘sure she had a watery grave’ before following them through the front escape hatch. He landed on the island in snow so deep that he had to feel his way up the cords of his parachute to find his way to the surface of the drift, then buried his harness but kept the parachute silk wrapped around him against the bitter cold.
Pryor walked to a village where he was offered help by members of the Norwegian Resistance, but ‘declined their offer for fear of vicious reprisals against the villagers’ by the Nazis. Soon afterwards he was captured by the Germans and became a PoW. One of his crew members, who may have been knocked unconscious as he exited the aircraft, failed to deploy his parachute and died, but the others survived, though, like Pryor, all were captured and became PoWs. Others were not so lucky.
Hit by flak, and with smoke belching from an engine while German fighters swarmed around his Lancaster, pouring in more rounds, Ian Ross was forced to ditch in the sea. Two other pilots from 617 Squadron, Freddy Watts and Jimmy Castagnola, flew to his assistance, their rear gunners targeting the fighters, and could see his crew scrambling onto the fuselage. Castagnola dropped them some Mae West life-jackets and his wireless operator managed to contact a patrolling air–sea rescue aircraft which flew to the scene and dropped a life-raft.
Watts’s rear gunner saw Ross’s crew clamber into the raft but, short of fuel, Watts then had to turn away towards the British coast, leaving the air–sea rescue aircraft circling the raft. Within minutes a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 had appeared and, as the unarmed air–sea rescue aircraft fled, the pilot of the German plane began strafing the life-raft. All seven crew were killed, and only the body of the wireless operator, Flying Officer Mowbray Ellwood, was ever found.
* * *
With his jury-rigged rudder and control cables, Tony Iveson had set out to nurse his crippled Lancaster back across the North Sea to the Shetlands. It was a 340-mile flight and, says Iveson, ‘you cannot measure three hundred and forty individual miles over the featureless sea, you can only endure it. The relief when at last I saw the Shetland Islands appearing out of the mist on the horizon was palpable.’
As they made their approach to Sumburgh airfield, he discovered that the hydraulics had also been shot away and, although they could still blow down and lock down the undercarriage, it would have an immediate effect on the Lancaster’s already precarious flying performance. He waited until the very last
moment and had just lowered the undercarriage on final approach to the runway when a Spitfire suddenly cut in front of him, its propeller motionless and the pilot holding a ‘dead stick’. Without any power, the Spitfire obviously had priority, and Iveson was forced to go around, praying his crippled aircraft would hold up long enough. ‘We were all quite detached by then,’ he said. ‘Either we were going to make it, or we weren’t.’
Lining up yet again on finals, he could see the Spitfire being pushed off the far end of the runway. As he landed, the Lancaster swerved off the runway to the left, the tyre of its port undercarriage having been shredded by the crippling cannon fire. They bumped and ground to a halt, got out and, says Iveson, ‘about then we started to shake a bit!’ His Lancaster never flew again, being classified ‘Category E’ – unrepairable. It also proved to be Tony Iveson’s last operation with 617 Squadron.
‘Bergen was talked about for a long time because of the losses,’ says one of the survivors of the raid, Colin Cole. ‘Two shot down and the Iveson crew shot up. It seemed to affect the squadron for quite a while.’10
* * *
Although the Battle of the Bulge did not end until 25 January, delaying Allied advances in the West, the pace of German defeats in the East was accelerating. The Soviets had brought forward a planned offensive to 3 January, and after liberating Warsaw on the 17th, the Red Army entered East Prussia three days later. After liberating Auschwitz on 27 January, Soviet troops crossed the Oder on the last day of the month, bringing them to within 50 miles of Berlin.
In the air, the pressure on Germany from Bomber Command and the USAAF was unrelenting. On the night of 13/14 February 1945, 800 RAF aircraft launched an attack on Dresden, the ancient capital city of Saxony, close to Germany’s eastern borders. The arguments and discussions around that attack still rage to this day, but there is no doubt the raid devastated the city and caused tens of thousands of deaths.