by John Nichol
There was no let-up, though, as they emerged on the other side. The sky above them was lit by flares dropped by German fighters, marking the position of the stream for their comrades. Cy called for absolute vigilance once more. Two bombers ahead exploded, but their Halifax remained untouched.
The danger had become relentless; even those with no belief in God asked for His protection. Frederick Taylor, pilot of V-Victor, had never been a religious man, but that night he heard himself reciting the 23rd Psalm. For hours on end. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd / I shall not want …’
Behind him, Sidney Whitlock’s radio went dead. A series of small explosions buffeted the aircraft. Sidney switched over to intercom and heard Taylor give the order to bale out. He could see smoke and flames rising from the bomb inspection panels on the floor. The front escape hatch was stuck fast, so he and the navigator scrambled to the back of the plane and hauled themselves over the main spar, trying to clip on their parachutes as they went. The tail gunner wrenched open the rear hatch and jumped. The mid-upper gunner followed.
Sidney sat down on the step and rolled out into the night. Falling, he pulled the ripcord and offered a prayer of thanks when the parachute opened above him. As he floated down he saw his aircraft hit the ground. Everyone had escaped apart from a new pilot flying second dickie and a stand-in flight engineer. Their usual one had been taken ill. Lucky bugger, Sidney thought. 53
Bruno Rupp could hardly believe his eyes. Locating the stream was more often than not a question of luck; it was usually cloaked by cloud. It was not uncommon for him to return to base without firing a single shot, having used half his fuel in the search. Yet here they were, bombers everywhere, lit up like Christmas trees. The radar screen was swarming with blips: if one bomber managed to escape, they would soon find another.
Bruno slid under one Lancaster. A burst of Schräge Musik was followed by a series of small explosions. Soon the aircraft would fall from the sky, but not, he hoped, before those on board had a chance to parachute to safety. He scored two kills that night.
Leutnant Wilhelm Seuss was enjoying even more success. He still could not quite believe they had been scrambled. Based at Erfurt, near Weimar in Saxony, he was due to go on leave the following day, and he had been so confident there would not be an enemy raid that he had already packed his bag.
Sent to circle the Otto beacon, he saw the bombers going down ‘one after the other’. The trail of burning wrecks on the ground led them directly to the bomber stream. ‘I flew along, following the crashes on the ground, and I saw a Lancaster in a searchlight, and I shot it down. I could have picked up bombers on my SN-2 but it wasn’t necessary. The stream was tightly concentrated and I shot down two more very quickly.’
Seuss eased beneath another Lancaster. His Schräge Musik guns were out of ammunition, but by mirroring each move the bomber made he remained unseen until the drum was changed. When the Allied pilot finally saw him and attempted to corkscrew, he only succeeded in flying directly into a cannon burst. A few seconds later the aircraft was consumed by fire. When it exploded, Seuss only narrowly avoided being hit by the blast. He turned for home. There was little enjoyment for him in such easy pickings. ‘I could have stayed in the stream and shot down even more, but I had simply had enough. My nerves were completely gone, and I thought if I carried on I would be endangering my crew.’54
The most successful German pilot that night was Martin Becker, the hero of Leipzig. Encountering the stream early, he managed to shoot down three Lancasters and three Halifaxes in the space of half an hour. He landed, not yet content with his night’s work, refuelled and took off once more. The ease with which a pilot of his skill could find and destroy the enemy that night devalued his success, he believed, even though Hitler was to personally award him a Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his efforts. ‘There were such a lot of British bombers around that we could have knocked them down with a fly flap.’55
Walter Heidenrich was the radar operator for a Junkers 88 crew led by Oberleutnant Günther Köberich. Based at Quakenbrück, north of Münster, they had 12 kills to their name, three on the Stuttgart raid. They were heading south when Heidenrich noticed something strange about the shape and size of the blip that had appeared on his screen. As they closed in on their target he discovered why: two Lancasters were flying so close that they had registered as one.
Köberich flew below them and fixed the nearest in his sights. His opening burst of Schräge Musik blinded him and his crew; for some reason, tracer had been loaded into the drum. When he regained his night vision he could see their first target in flames. He turned his attention to the second. Another short burst and that Lancaster too was mortally wounded.
Heidenrich watched the whole eerie episode unfold. ‘For quite a time, the two of them went straight ahead, both on fire. One went off to the left and crashed on the right-hand bank of the Rhine, while the other crashed on the opposite bank. When they hit they seemed to burst in all directions, with all sorts of colours, reds and greens and yellows. I think they were Pathfinder machines … I don’t know whether they were found, and I don’t know whether any of the crews managed to get out, but I think they probably had time to.’56
In fact, only one Allied airman survived: a wireless operator, blown out of his Lancaster with his parachute miraculously intact.
Not every German ace was able to add to his tally. Major Wilhelm Herget had 49 kills to his credit and was unable to reach his half-century. ‘I got into the stream and I could see bombers going down to my left but I could not find one of my own … I could have kicked myself; it was obvious that the other fighters were doing well.’
Diverted to the Otto beacon, he just managed to avoid pulling the trigger on a particularly aimless Junkers 88 which flew across his sights. ‘I was furious. I nearly put a few rounds in front of his nose to wake him up.’57
Those watching the massacre unfold from the centre of the stream knew they would be haunted by the sight for ever more.
‘Gunners, keep your eyes open; there’s two aircraft just been shot down right in front of us …’ Reg Payne’s pilot, Michael Beetham, warned his crew of the danger ahead.
‘Three more have gone down behind us …’ the rear gunner added.
Another bomber blew up on their port side. Reg went to see what was happening. ‘I darted up to the astrodome and saw the smoke and the shower of flames as an aircraft died in front of my eyes. Seven people in it; gone in an instant.’
He gazed at the burning trail on the ground ahead. We’re flying into that, he thought. Their rear gunner reckoned he could also see blazing wreckage stretching back for 60 miles behind them. Reg was stunned by the brightness of the moonlight above them and the fires raging below. He could see the other Lancasters and Halifaxes so clearly that he could read their squadron codes.
They flew alongside another Lancaster for a few moments, then watched helplessly as a string of cannon shells tore into its belly and transformed it into a ball of fire. Reg didn’t see the fighter that shot it down. All he knew was that it could have been them; for some reason fate had decided some other poor buggers’ number was up.
Les Bartlett, Michael Beetham’s bomb aimer, thought they were only seconds away from being hit. The situation appeared calamitous. ‘I looked down on the port beam at the area over which we had passed. It looked like a battlefield. There were kites burning on the deck, all over the place – bombs going off where they had been jettisoned by bombers damaged in combat, and fires from their incendiaries across the whole area. Such a picture of aerial disaster I had never seen before and certainly hope never to see again. I suppose it was just the same on daylight raids, except that the spectacle of a kite on fire at night is much more terrifying.’58
Ray Francis, a Lancaster flight engineer on 622 Squadron, reckoned they were only 50 miles into the raid when he saw his first aircraft burn: a furnace-like blaze spiralling downwards. Nuremberg was only his fourth op: he wondered if this level of destruct
ion was normal. Aircraft after aircraft fell from the sky. I hope to God I get out of this, he thought.
Streams of red tracer streaked across the sky, seeming to hang in an endless arc while the planes ahead continued to disappear in lightning flashes. Driven by the need for self-preservation, the pilot, Ray Trenouth, tried to climb above the main stream. The gunners swivelled constantly in their turrets in search of enemy fighters while the skipper and flight engineer scoured their port and starboard flanks. Even the wireless operator was detailed on watch, standing in the astrodome, staring at the unforgiving sky.
The mid-upper gunner saw the fighter first and ordered a starboard corkscrew. He tried firing a defensive burst, but his guns had an automatic cut-out to prevent him from destroying the tail of his own aircraft. The rear gunner squeezed off a salvo as they dived and turned and his tracer mingled briefly with the enemy’s.
They shook off their attacker and resumed course. Now it was the rear gunner’s turn to issue the warning: another enemy fighter was at their heel. Trenouth reacted instantly and vigorously, almost throwing their aircraft out of the sky. Hemmed in and immobile because of the g-forces generated by the spinning plane, the rear gunner was unable to fire, but it didn’t matter – the fighter had gone. The violence of the manoeuvre, however, had caused a blockage in the guns.
Trenouth sent the wireless operator back to take a look as they flew on. When he didn’t return and the guns were still inoperative Ray went back to check on him. After clambering through the fuselage, hoping that another corkscrew wasn’t in the offing, he found his crew-mate slumped unconscious from lack of oxygen. He managed to drag him back to the main supply before returning to finish the job himself. The guns were soon in working order. For now, they had survived.
As Ray Trenouth climbed higher, others left the stream altogether. Those who remained in the formation took some comfort from the idea of safety in numbers, but that was in the process of being fatally undermined that night. The night fighters were drawn relentlessly to where the pickings were richest; as the enemy feasted on the main stream like vultures on carrion, those who struck out on their own reckoned they stood a greater chance of survival.
Pathfinder Jack Watson and his crew, at the cutting edge of the stream, had almost reached the end of the straight leg when a bomber blew up beneath their Lancaster. They saw no fighter, and no evidence of one once the sky had cleared; there was a chance they were the intended target, and had that unfortunate bomber not flown underneath them at that exact point they might have become another victim of Schräge Musik.
Chick Chandler, a flight engineer with 622 at Mildenhall, had never witnessed destruction on this scale. He could not tear his eyes from the cauldron of fire in the sky. There were explosions all around them; aircraft with fire streaming from their wings battling to stay in the air, and then finally going into a flat spin. Each time, Chick willed the crew to bale out before that point. He knew that if they were still on board, the colossal g-forces and the speed at which the plane fell would mean there was little chance of escape.
Whilst others strove to distance themselves, focus on their jobs, forget there were men just like them on those burning planes, Chick felt more scared than ever. There are people dying out there, he thought, and wondered when it might be his turn.
Ray Francis’s crew
The gunner’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Fighter low on the port side.’
For the moment, there was no order to corkscrew and the pilot held the same course. All eyes were on the night sky. Chick turned, eyes unblinking, peering out at the night sky for an oncoming shadow, aware that a moment’s lapse could lead to their death.
A Junkers 88, ‘bigger than life’, was boring in from the starboard quarter.
Chick screamed, ‘Corkscrews starboard go!’ and ducked, as if that would help. As the bomber corkscrewed, the Junkers strafed the underside of their port wing. The skipper continued his defensive move, and when he levelled out the fighter had gone. ‘When we’d straightened up, I did a visual check and I could see petrol coming out of the outer fuel tank on the port wing. I thought, Oh my God! Then I realised that the fighter had hit a tank with just a tiny bit of fuel remaining. We had been lucky.’
The tension eased a fraction. ‘Who gave the order?’ the pilot asked.
No one spoke. Chick’s voice had been so high-pitched that it had been unrecognisable. But his panic had saved them. A second later and the enemy shells would have blasted into the body of the aircraft and transformed them into a flaming Catherine wheel. Chick had never seen a German fighter before. He prayed he would never see one again.
Even now, more than 65 years after that night, Chick Chandler’s eyes grow wide as he recalls the sight of that enemy aircraft tearing out of the darkness towards him. ‘The whole thing was so vivid I can still see it quite clearly,’ he recalls, sitting in his favourite armchair in his Hampshire cottage. He holds his hands out in front of his face. ‘It’s there!’
There were so many men parachuting from stricken planes that navigator Ron Butcher was forced to alter course and gain height to avoid hitting them. As far as Ron was concerned, ‘fear was inevitable, death was near’, even at 23,500 feet. Below them the moonlight framed the airborne version of Dante’s Inferno. Nimble night fighters spun the cumbersome bombers around in an endless dance of death.
Ron usually stayed cocooned at his station but that night the gasps of incredulity and horror from other members of his crew brought him out to watch. Never before had he seen a plane going down in flames, or the ghostly shapes of parachuting airmen. His initial reaction was ‘Thank God it’s not us’, followed quickly by a rush of guilt. The guilt was fleeting, though. What could they do about it? he asked himself. Not a thing. There was no point dwelling on the fate of others.
Towards the back of the stream, bomb aimer Andy Wiseman had been waiting as patiently as ever to carry out his job. To keep himself occupied on the journey to their target, he maintained a ceaseless vigil for fighters. They were still an hour from Nuremberg and the seven minutes when he would be called into action.
Without warning, there was a burst of cannon fire; tracer shot past their starboard wing. Another burst struck home; flames blossomed from a port engine. There was a curse over the intercom, and another, louder, when the wounded propeller started to rattle. A starboard engine had also been hit. The bomber started to dive. Andy was at the pilot’s side, watching him wrestle with the controls, doing everything in his power to keep it level. For a few seconds their lives seemed to hang in the balance. Andy’s thoughts turned to his girlfriend Jean. She would be in bed, asleep, blissfully unaware of the trouble he was in. Maybe his last letter would be delivered after all.
By a stroke of luck the fire went out, but the engine died with it. With only two out of four working, there was no question of continuing. The flight engineer reported that the fuel tanks were intact. The pilot shouted to the navigator for a reciprocal course. There was nothing for it but to turn back. They would jettison their bombs to lighten their load for the return flight, but a long way short of their target.
There were so many marauding fighters on that long leg that luck was often all that stood between life and death. Leonard Dack, a wireless operator with 106 Squadron, boasted one of the most remarkable tales in a night that was already studded with them. His Lancaster had been struck in the bomb bay. ‘The Skipper said, “It’s time to get out, everyone.” I was a careful sort of bloke and I always kept my parachute underneath my seat. I put it on, but then she went down with all four engines flat out. It went through my mind that it was just like a scene from one of those American films; the aircraft going down, screaming out of control. Once that started, I knew we couldn’t get out. I was thrown on top of the navigator and we were rolling about together. I remember my face being pressed against two dials which I remembered were in the roof so I knew we were upside down. I tried to prod the navigator up towards the front to get out of the fron
t hatch. All the time I had the awful thought that we had a Blockbuster on board which went off on impact. I forgot that we wouldn’t have survived the impact ourselves.
‘Then there was an almighty explosion and I was sent spinning. I thought we had hit the ground but it eventually dawned on me that I was still in the air. Then something whooshed past my face and I was sitting nice and peacefully up in the sky under my parachute. I remember shouting for my wife – I was apologising because I had promised to be home on Saturday.’59
Leonard and the flight engineer were the only two of their crew to survive.
Rusty Waughman was in the later waves of the stream. The tension mounted inexorably as he flew further into German territory. He was unaware that two crews from his squadron had already gone down, but had no illusions about what lay ahead. He called for silence and asked his gunners to scan the sky for night fighters. Only they were allowed to speak over the intercom.
Before either gunner said a word there were two explosions to their starboard side. Rusty could see ice-blue tracer trails arrowing towards a target and then disappearing, consumed by the explosion they had triggered. It was a new experience for Rusty; he had never seen tracer like that before. ‘Usually they were a sort of pinky-scarlet, things which float up towards you then whip past. It was certainly alarming because there was such a mass of it. But in a strange way it was quite spectacular.’
One of his gunners broke the silence. ‘Lancaster in trouble on port beam …’
‘There’s another one on fire. Jesus, look at that …’
The intercom was soon crowded with disbelieving voices. Alec the navigator tried his best to note the positions of each fallen aircraft as accurately as possible. Rusty had counted 16, Alec even more. Every fatal hit was relayed across the intercom in astonished detail.