by Mark Zuehlke
The wing’s first combat mission at the end of March was part of 2nd Tactical Air Force’s attempts to gain air superiority by attacking Luftwaffe airfields. Squadrons 441 and 442 struck a field near Dreux, France. Shortly after takeoff, Johnson’s plane developed radio trouble and he was forced to abort, leaving Wing Commander E.P. Wells assuming command. From a position well to the west of the airfield, the approaching Canadian pilots could see a large cluster of twin-engine aircraft with no sign of any pilots trying to get them airborne. Before the Germans discovered their presence, Wells told 442 to maintain altitude to serve as both a decoy and to provide cover in the event that enemy fighters appeared. He then led 441 in a screaming dive out of the sun towards the parked aircraft. “The squadron,” Wells reported, “dived very rapidly to ground level on the south side of the airfield and made an extremely fast run across it at about 400 miles per hour, each pilot selecting his target on the run in. The Spitfires continued low down and fast for a couple miles after the attack, then pulled up fast and reformed without any difficulty.”10
The Spitfires were well suited for this kind of strafing attack and this was the type of flying for which the pilots were specifically trained. The first time Wing Commander Johnson saw his “lean Spitfire with two bombs hanging on its slender wings, I decided that I was never going to be crazy about this phase of our work. The Spitfire seemed intolerably burdened with her load, and the ugly, blunt bombs were a basic contradiction of all [its] beauty and symmetry.”
Johnson asked McLeod what he thought. Ever the scrapper, McLeod allowed that he would rather see two “decent long-range tanks to hang under the wings” instead of the bombs because that would allow them to “go to Berlin with the Yanks and get stuck into some real fighting.”11
Aesthetics aside, there was another problem. When fitted with two five-hundred-pound bombs, the Spitfire frames were stressed by the weight and there was no type of bombsight or other aiming device. Aim directly at the target during the dive and the bombs, falling away on a line of flight different from the descending plane, struck short. Wing Commander Hugh Godefroy, one of the most veteran and respected RCAF fighter officers, was commanding 127 Wing when his squadrons had to begin experimenting with the dive-bombing. “The target was to be approached at eight thousand feet,” he later wrote. “When it was opposite the wing tip, the aircraft was to be turned and dived at an angle of sixty degrees holding the bead of the gun-sight on the target. At three thousand feet a gradual pull-out was to be executed and on the count of three, the bomb was dropped.”
That was the theory, but Godefroy discovered “that this technique of dive-bombing was extremely inaccurate. One could only guess at what was a 60° dive. Without dive brakes, Spitfires dived so fast that the hands of the altimeter went around in a blur. Pulling out at exactly three thousand feet with the use of an instrument that lagged was impossible.”12
Not surprisingly, accuracy was negligible. Normally, the targets were missed by anywhere from seventy to three hundred yards. Yet the dive-bombing missions were of critical importance in isolating the invasion battlefield from German attempts to bring in reinforcements. Targets were road and railway bridges, viaducts, and communication hubs. The pilots and staff planners viewing the results of the training attacks fretted that the Spitfire and Typhoon dive-bombers would present little more than a nuisance to the Germans.13 But the training continued, with all concerned hoping the pilots could sharpen their skills enough to do some good on the bombing front while continuing to conduct ongoing combat missions over the continent.
Finally, on May 8, with the pace of attacks on the northwest Europe transportation system quickening, Davidson’s 143 Wing drew a dive-bombing mission. The morning dawned bright and clear, but a heavy white frost coated the ground as nine Typhoons from 438 Squadron formed up on the runway at Manston. Davidson was in command. Theirs was a top priority target, the Douai railway yards—twenty miles south of Lille, in northern France. Just as the planes were to take off, Davidson’s Typhoon developed a problem and he had to quickly exchange it for another. The Typhoons achieved complete surprise, sweeping down quickly to drop their bombs before any anti-aircraft guns could be brought to bear. “Results were very good,” recorded the squadron diarist, who also noted that this was the deepest penetration the squadron had made into enemy territory. As the squadron raced home, Davidson’s engine stalled while still over France. Unable to get the temperamental 24-cylinder Napier Sabre engine going again, he was last seen by the other pilots in the raiding party gliding towards earth. Davidson managed a dead-stick landing unscathed and was quickly scooped up by the French Resistance. (He would emerge in September 1944 when Allied troops marched past his hiding place.)14
ALLIED FIGHTER SQUADRONS found it difficult to lure Luftwaffe fighters into the skies for head-to-head combat throughout early 1944. Just as the Allies desperately sought to destroy German planes before the invasion, the Luftwaffe attempted to preserve its dwindling forces for that decisive moment. To force the Luftwaffe into battle while simultaneously crippling northwest Europe’s rail system, the size and pace of Ramrod missions was stepped up. These missions sent bombers, heavily protected by fighters, against important ground targets that the Germans could not easily allow to be destroyed. In April and May, railroad bridges, tunnels, marshalling yards, and rolling stock were given special attention.
Sometimes the Luftwaffe took the bait, other times not. On March 27, four separate Ramrod missions pounded marshalling yards from Belgium to southern France and attacked coastal gun batteries along the French coast. The next day, Ramrod 804 sent a massive force of bombers to savage the Nantes-Gassicourt railroad line and the Creil marshalling yards, with flights of Canadian and British fighters hovering protectively overhead. At the same time, RAF Typhoon squadrons, also protected by fighters, dive-bombed V-1 launch sites along the coast and other targets near Caen. Both days, the Luftwaffe stayed on the ground.15
On May 21, with the invasion fast approaching, Ramrod 905 launched seventeen hundred planes, including four hundred RCAF and RAF fighters, into northwest Europe to devastate the railway network and force the Luftwaffe to fight. Five of the nine Spitfire squadrons were RCAF—402, 403, 416, 421, and 441. Wing Commander Johnson led one three-squadron group, while Wing Commander Lloyd “Chad” Chadburn commanded another. Hailing from Aurora, Ontario, Chadburn had won a DFC in the battle over Dieppe and was one of the RCAF’s most respected wing commanders. After grouping over Hawking, the strike force roared across the English Channel and Belgian coastline to hit targets around Brussels and throughout northwest France. While the bombers slammed marshalling yards, the fighters raced down to strafe trains caught on the move.
German anti-aircraft batteries defending the marshalling yards hurled up massive volleys of flak, and every train jumped by the fighters proved heavily protected by flak and machine-gun batteries mounted on flat cars or freight-car roofs. While the raid reportedly destroyed 159 locomotives, only three of these fell prey to the strafing fighters that bore the brunt of Allied losses. Twenty-one fighters and twenty pilots, including four Canadians, were reported missing or dead at the end of the operation. The Luftwaffe again refused the fight.
Not so the next day, however, when just eighteen Spitfires from Chadburn’s 416 Squadron swept across the Channel to pounce rolling stock. Finding the trains less heavily protected by flak batteries, the Spitfires destroyed four locomotives before coming across an airstrip from which German fighters were scrambling. At the end of the ensuing low-level melee, five Canadians each claimed a kill. Three of the pilots, Flight Lieutenant Patterson, Flying Officer McFadden, and Pilot Officer Palmer, witnessed their kills hit the earth. But the scrap was more chaotic for flight lieutenants Mason and Forbes-Roberts. After snapping a quick burst at one German fighter, Mason found another had jumped his tail. As he yanked his plane into a hard evasive turn, Mason saw the plane he had fired on struggling “to level out at tree-top level [before going] down into a lar
ge field at over 250 mph. I was right on the deck behind him and he did not come up from the field. I was unable to see him crash as the other aircraft was breaking into me.” Palmer supported his claim, having “observed an aircraft crash in a field, with a little smoke or dust rising from it but not being on fire.” Forbes-Roberts, meanwhile, had pounced on a German fighter just lifting off the runway. When his opening machine-gun burst scored a small strike, Forbes-Roberts loosed a second burst of machine-gun and cannon fire that also struck home before flashing by the German plane and losing sight of it. Patterson, however, saw a German plane go into a spin about five hundred yards from his position and at an altitude of only five hundred feet, while Palmer spotted a parachute drifting down near the airstrip. Forbes-Roberts was consequently credited with a kill.16
Downing five fighters in a single day was a significant achievement for any Allied squadron operating in northwest European skies in the first part of 1944. So seldom did the Luftwaffe venture out to fight that between November 1943 and D-Day all Canadian Spitfire squadrons could claim only fifty-six victories—fourteen being downed by 401 Squadron.17
More successful were the Canadians who stalked their prey by night. There were four such RCAF squadrons in Britain: 406, 409, 410, and 418. The first three were night fighters, generally defending the skies over the United Kingdom. No. 418 Squadron was trained and equipped as an intruder unit, venturing under cover of darkness into German-occupied territory.
Early in January, the Luftwaffe had launched a last-gasp terror bombing campaign against London to retaliate against the massive day and night bombing raids of Berlin during the same period. At the end of February, these sporadic raids shifted away from the British capital to ports and shipping to disrupt the Allied invasion buildup. Even though the German pilots attempted to sneak into British skies by trailing in the wake of Allied bombers returning from night raids on the continent, the night fighters usually intercepted them. By the end of May, the Luftwaffe had lost 329 bombers and had failed to seriously crimp the invasion preparations.18
While the Canadian night fighter defence squadrons had been knocking down Luftwaffe bombers, the intruder squadron claimed the greatest number of kills of any Canadian squadron. Led by thirty-three-year-old Wing Commander Paul Yettvart Davoud, who had been born in Provo, Utah but immigrated to Canada in the 1930s to fly for Canadian Airways, the squadron had been re-equipped in early 1944 with the Mosquito. Versatile, fast, and incredibly nimble for a two-engine plane, the Mosquito packed enormous firepower, with four 20-millimetre Hispano cannons slung under its body and four .303 Browning machine guns mounted in the nose. For bombing missions, it could carry four five-hundred-pound bombs. Mosquitoes had a two-man crew, the pilot and a navigator. Often referred to as the “Wooden Wonder” because the light plywood construction rendered it difficult to detect with radar, the Mosquito had enormous range for such a small craft. It was capable of flying 1,860 miles and was originally designed to strike targets deep inside Germany and then to use its superior speed to dash home before the Luftwaffe and flak units could respond. In a string of intruder raids during the first five months of 1944, 418 Squadron proved that the Mosquito was an unparallelled night fighter. By the end of May, it reported fifty-five air-to-air kills and the destruction of forty-six more planes caught on the ground.19
As May closed, Leigh-Mallory rightly claimed that the Luftwaffe in northwest Europe was so shot up that it posed little threat to the gathering invasion forces. He estimated air-to-air combat losses to the Germans inflicted by AEAF aircraft operating from bases in Britain between November 1943 and the invasion, at 2,655. No reliable estimate of planes destroyed on the ground was possible because many had been destroyed by high-level light and medium bomber strikes, but such losses were believed to greatly exceed the air-to-air kill total.20
In the three weeks leading up to D-Day, Leigh-Mallory had directed increasing numbers of bombers to carry out strikes to eliminate or neutralize all airfields that lay within “a radius of 150 miles of Caen. The primary object of these attacks was to destroy the aircraft repair, maintenance, and servicing facilities and thereby cause the maximum interference with the operational ability of the German Air Force.”21
To keep German intelligence guessing as to where the landings were to occur, the same intensity of operations had to be carried out against airfields throughout western France, Belgium, and Holland. So while forty airfields within the Caen radius were selected for destruction, an additional fifty-nine elsewhere were designated as priority targets. Ninety-one of these ninety-nine airfields were subjected to bomber strikes that dropped a total of 6,717 tons of bombs. In the aftermath, Leigh-Mallory’s staff determined that the attacks “accomplished the desired object of placing the enemy under the same handicap as the Allied fighters by forcing them to operate from airfields a long way from the assault area.”22
Airfields were not normally the prime focus of bomber operations. There remained the transportation system, with thirty-seven railway targets ranging from marshalling yards to key bridges designated for destruction. Twenty-two of these were judged at the end of May to have been “sufficiently damaged to require no more attention” during the initial invasion period. Another fifteen were “severely damaged.” A German report intercepted by Allied intelligence confirmed the success, with the author gloomily judging the entire transportation system linking France to Germany “most seriously crippled.”23
ALTHOUGH CURRENT TECHNIQUES had proven effective against many targets, the Allies were soon to unveil several new means to destroy targets previously immune to bomber or fighter-bomber attacks. Flight Officer Donald Harry Cheney of Ottawa had been flying Lancaster heavy bombers in 630 Squadron, RAF in late April 1944, when ordered one morning to report immediately to Air Vice-Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane. A staff car with driver and guard waited to whisk the twenty-four-year-old officer to his meeting with the commander of No. 5 Group, Bomber Command. Cheney’s “heart just absolutely turned to an ice cube. What in the name of heaven have I done?” he wondered.
Soon Cheney was being ushered into an office situated in a country home so sumptuous and comfortable that it was hard to believe this was the headquarters of a man who regularly sent hundreds of bomber crews to wreak destruction over the night skies of continental Europe. “Good morning, Cheney. I’m very happy to meet you,” the air vice-marshal said as he stepped from behind a great desk to shake the young flyer’s hand. After offering Cheney a cigarette and lighting it for him, Cochrane gestured to a chair.
Sensing Cheney’s continuing anxiety, Cochrane said, “Now, I want you to completely relax. I have something that I want to discuss with you and I will not ask you to give me an answer right away, but I will expect an answer in twenty-four hours.” Had Cheney ever heard of 617 Squadron? the air vice-marshal asked.
“Yes, Sir, I certainly have. That’s the Dam Buster squadron, the Death or Glory Boys.”
Cochrane grinned at that. “Well, you have a very good record of finding targets, in getting through, in completing your missions, and getting home even with an engine short and so on.” He noted that Cheney had twenty missions under his belt, as did his crew. “We think that you might be good material to bolster this squadron. We are going to be developing some very interesting new techniques. You will learn more in due time about the new developments that are coming and new targets that are coming, but you would be, if you agree, assigned to special work which will have great bearing on the outcome of this war. That will be all, thank you. I have other things to attend to.” Cochrane reminded Cheney that he needed an answer the following morning.
After getting permission from his squadron commander to open the sergeant’s mess early, Cheney gathered his seven-man flight crew together to discuss the proposition over drinks. His was a smorgasbord crew, with Cheney the only Canadian, the flight engineer and navigator both Scottish, the bombardier Welsh, radio operator and rear gunner English, and the mid-upper gunner Australian.
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br /> “Now it comes to a vote,” he said. “If we’re going to go to this squadron the likelihood is that we’ll finish our tour there unless we come a cropper. It’s a wonderful squadron. Air Vice-Marshal Cochrane told me that the squadron commander, Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, is probably the finest bomber pilot in the world and as brave as a lion. So we have an opportunity to make a very, very significant contribution to the war.”
Cheney did not state the two conflicting concerns each man must wrestle with before voting. On the one hand, the crew was living on borrowed time. They were engaged in a continuous run of night missions over Germany. It was common to fly as many as three missions against Berlin a week. Or a raid might take them to the Ruhr, where the factory cities bristled with anti-aircraft defences and swarms of night fighters, or any of several equally heavily defended cities in the heart of the Reich. Endless nights of tedium sporadically broken by stretches of terror as the sky around the Lancasters lit up with incendiaries and flak and the flashing cannon of attacking night fighters. Bombers fell, the formations closed to fill the gaps, bombs were dropped, and the long return flight began. So far they had been lucky. Twenty missions and all still alive. Such fortune was rare and could not be trusted to continue.
But 617 Squadron had come by the Death and Glory Boys nickname honestly. On May 16, 1943, in a spectacular raid, nineteen Lancasters attacked and breached three important Ruhr valley dams. Eight of the bombers were shot down and 53 of 133 crewmen died, while another three were taken prisoner. The squadron went on to complete one special raid after another against targets in Italy, France, and Germany. Six months after their combat debut, only six of the crews from the first raid survived.