There was more action the following week as the full moon approached.
Going on a low level to attack Jerry planes going to raid us – boy just what I have been waiting for – a real honest to goodness crack at these birds who think such a lot of themselves and so little of everybody else.
(JJD 29 October 1941)
It was a low-level raid on Schiphol airfield near Amsterdam, mounted in response to a large force of enemy aircraft detected there. The weather was most unfavourable, however, and only three aircraft located and bombed the target. The rest abandoned the task after a long search, and one aircraft failed to return.
There were supposed to be a number of Jerry planes ready to bomb one of our towns – we were sent to bomb them before taking off – they never took off but not because of us – but the weather. We stooged over roof tops in Holland for one whole hour looking for the joint. Every now & then we would get fired at but nothing hit us. We had to bring our bombs back the Dutch have enough worries without our bombs.
(JJOD 29 October 1941)
Two nights later, the Squadron dispatched fifteen aircraft on Hamburg, of which twelve found and bombed the target and adjoining area. The others bombed alternative targets at Kiel and Eckernforde. Opposition was intense and accurate. Of the total Bomber Command force of 123 aircraft on this raid, only fifty-six crews claimed to have bombed, in conditions of poor visibility. Hamburg reported that one person was killed, eight were injured, and 175 were bombed out.
Back to [Blohm und Voss] sub works at Hamburg to-nite – have reached the stage where I appreciate this job – [I] like flying with Roberts because he is old for his years, skillful modest & cautious to make up for my reckless careless tendency – we get along well together and have confidence in one another. (JJD 31 October 1941)
The same type of trip as a few nights ago – the same objective – submarine factory – weather was too cloudy over target to pick out the factory so we dropped our bombs on the town – Again we got thru luckily without getting molested – the place is dynamite but we are still lucky at Hamburg. (JJOD 31 October 1941)
In the midst of all this, Joe reunited with Monty
Swung a 48 hr pass – caught a train & whizzed down to Bournemouth – after the usual telegrams & near [misses] I found Monty – good old Monty & we proceeded to make up for lost time – we drank, smoked cigars & talked until 4 AM – a really historic meeting for the two of us. (JJD 27 October 1941)
Back in stride with Mub, snooker – ping pong – cigars – talk – jokes companionship – he is a great fellow who will work & live with me and think & inspire me as long as I live. (JJD 28 October 1941)
After three months hemorrhaging of his close circle at 106 Squadron, Joe had suddenly, miraculously, been reunited with the friend who mattered the most to him. Joe’s bonds with Roger and Dave, now those most close to him in the squadron, had been formed by the immediate daily reality of shared purpose, circumstance, and danger, and their emerging interest in politics. His Pony Club pals were far away – he had not seen Herb for over a year. Gerald had brought to the Pony Club his sense of humour and fun, he was sharp and adventuresome, always a good source of news and gossip of the Montreal crowd. The bond between Joe and Monty was deeper, based on shared experience, outlook, and views. It was not conditional on being in the same combat unit and its intensity would not fade if that ended. They did not need to explain themselves to each other or put up a good front. For the next three months, they would be inseparable on their leave times, which they made every effort to coordinate. As time went on, Joe’s friendship with Janine would become secondary to his bond with Monty.
Joe returned to Coningsby invigorated, with renewed enthusiasm for action. It also reignited his correspondence with Gerald and Herb:
Last Sunday I was flying. I arrived back from Hamburg at dawn, hopped a train and was making a square search of the town for Monty by 6 PM after travelling all day. In traditional style Mub and I bumped into each other. Why I do not know – how I cannot explain – we merely did the logical thing and bumped into one another in England – amazing but true.
It is hard to depict my reactions at seeing Mub again. Imagine yourself away from home for seven months. Then imagine yourself in a strange country. Then try to imagine the insecurity of flying over Germany week after week and you will realize what a reunion it was. The impossible occurred. Nothing seemed more fantastic to me than that I should see Mub again – even up until after Sunday night. Yet nothing seemed more natural than to be calmly smoking Mub’s cigars, consuming his liquor and spending the night until 4 AM chatting, talking, planning and mulling over the past seven months with Monty and listening to stories of my family, Poneyites – Monty’s and your families and adventures.
… Women for a change did not enter into our activities. I only had a day and a night and we had too much to talk about to bother about females. … It was a great occasion for both of us and ended with a hectic taxi ride thru town to catch the last train for me which was gathering up steam to pull out. (JJL 2 November 1941)
Inevitably he took the occasion to exhort them to train as aircrew:
If you want safety join air force ground crew since you will be safer than you are on civvy street. If you really want to live – join aircrew. If you get fooled and get knocked off you still have nothing to worry about because you will never know … what hit you.
… We never thought a great deal of Hy Abrams. But he showed he had guts and stuff in the pinch. He took the hardest and most dangerous course. He got what fifty percent of my pals got. But you have to admire and respect men like that –
But don’t fool yourself with regards your job – the dangers are non-existent – therefore you can’t expect much in return – at least not the life I consider worthwhile. … But if you want to be a flyer don’t think that you are one when you start repairing radio sets – you are a plain ordinary electrician, and doing a nice, safe, uninteresting, routine job. If you are a man with plenty of guts and spirit and determination you fly – yes you get killed too but you can’t live forever and if you can show your stuff early and clear out you justify your presence. Just hanging around for three score and ten years doesn’t suit me – …
(JJL 2 November 1941)
Relating all this to his family, he wrote:
The four continuous days and nights of constant, exciting and varied activity, far from wearying me, made me feel better than usual – the more activity and work and excitement the better I like it, the better I feel and look and the happier I am. (JJL 1 November 1941).
All the while, Joe was considering his next moves. He told his father
I am really getting intrigued with possibilities here. Don’t bother with Ottawa Pop – I can handle everything that requires handling for the time being. I am over half thru on this job but I am going to stick around for a while. I could not stand it in Canada while the war is on. I get exasperated when I go to places like Bournemouth over here or other resorts full of evacuees. This is the chance of a life time to live with real men – who don’t talk about what they are doing or have done but what they do is hard to do justice to in black and white or mere words – I have lived with men before but I like this gang on operations if not always for their personalities – at least for what they do and the way they do it. … (JJL 1 November 1941)
Whether Joe was referring to their personalities or their views is unclear. His own views on class, creed, and government, as they had evolved by this time, were probably not widely shared on his squadron. But all that would have been secondary to the job at hand, and the qualities that enabled his comrades to do it.
The month ended on a satisfactory note for Joe. In the last three weeks, 106 Squadron had been operational on eight nights, and Joe had been dispatched on seven of them to a mix of industrial, naval, and airfield targets. On most nights he had found the target and believed he had been more successful than in September. Perhaps this was because only one of them wa
s in the Ruhr with its heavy haze and smoke, the rest being targets on Germany’s north coast. By the end of the month he had completed eighteen sorties amounting to about 120 hours of operational flying time, or about 60 percent through his first tour. He had also been briefed and taken off on two sorties that had to be aborted. Joe was no longer under any illusions about the dangers he faced, but the end was close enough that he could begin to count down.
For flying crews operating out of English aerodromes, bouts of danger and terror in the air were separated by intervals of comfort and safety on the ground, with ready access to the pleasures of civilian life. Their experience of war was very different from the infantryman’s. Aircrew did not eat and sleep rough, they were not filthy and lice-ridden for days on end, they were not directly exposed to the brutality of deadly man-to-man fighting, and very rarely did they see the men next to them suddenly dismembered, disembowelled, or disintegrated. Flying crews on active duty received a week’s crew leave every five or six weeks. Yet the alternation of danger and tranquillity within hours of each other – the sudden and mostly unpredictable shifts between terror and relief – placed its own physical and psychological stresses on bomber crews.
Flying stress was not well understood in the early years of the war. The physical stress of long flights confined in cramped, noisy, and unpressurized aircraft that had most certainly not been built for comfort, was obvious enough. Flying for up to eight hours at high altitudes in those conditions brought risks of oxygen deficiency, and especially in winter, extreme cold and even frostbite, but young flyers were hardy enough and sufficiently well equipped to endure these conditions, even if not at peak efficiency.
The psychological stresses were less tangible but more cumulative. A man might laugh off a sortie as a piece of cake, yet the prospect of coming to grief from flak or night-fighters, from adverse weather conditions or running short of fuel, was always present. In the darkness of enemy skies, crews were hunted by invisible but omnipresent lethal forces that could strike without warning. They pressed on for hours with no control over these dangers and little defence against them. As they approached their target and the German defences, their anxiety and adrenalin rose. Crew cohesion, faith in each other’s competence, and mutual dependence helped, but each man was on his own in his duties and at his station in the aircraft.
Psychological stress was not restricted to the air. The tension began at briefing time, especially if the announced target was known to be a difficult one, and it continued to build during flight preparation. Yet being told at the last minute to stand down as operations were cancelled brought little comfort and no less stress. Extended periods of inactivity meant only frustration, and they lowered morale. With loss rates running at 4 or 5 percent on every operation, the likelihood of surviving a tour of thirty sorties was very low. Every man knew the odds. Yet at the same time, experience built confidence. Most wanted to complete their tour as soon as possible rather than spin it out.
Fear and anxiety were ever-present, and over prolonged periods became physically exhausting and psychologically draining. Flying stress wore down even the strongest over time. Aircrew kept such fears to themselves as they could not let themselves or their comrades down. The premium was on repression and self-control. Joe was strong on the latter; for the former, he channelled his letters and diaries for release. The penalty for not being able to carry on was not only loss of face, but being labelled LMF (lack of moral fibre) resulting in dismissal and disgrace. That happened to very few men in Bomber Command, but many more came to carry the scars of what would be characterized, many decades later, as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Percy, from the other side of the ocean, observed Joe’s progress:
Monty and Gerald here for dinner tonight. … Monty’s farewell visit he expects to leave for overseas service the end of the week. Fine lad, brains, sensibility and humour. … Gerald too a nice kind lad, sensitive and fine … I think Janet rather likes Gerald … understatement perhaps. Pleasant evening. Will miss Monty. Know May thinks of Joe a lot. Her sleep is sometimes disturbed. Hard for her. She never complains. (PJD 23 September 1941)
Letters from Joe are always so lively and sound so happy that the dream I had about him the other night seemed so vivid by contrast. He had come home unexpectedly from the front. He looked straight and strong but his eyes looked so tired and strained and there was something that seemed to be bothering him, something he could not express. He looked so unhappy. Possibly due to a headache which persisted while I slept. Still it was disturbing and rather unnerved me.
(PJD 8 October 1941)
[Joe] is more concerned about facing life after the war than facing death now. He feels that it is harder to lead the fine life than it is to face daily danger. I guess the lad is right. He is eager for his life to be as valuable in peacetime as it is in wartime. We keep all Joe’s letters. I wish I was not his father so I can say all the things I want to say about him. Anyway he is a grand lad and I cannot help but recording that I am as proud of him as his mother is … if he is only spared. His letters are racy but every now and again they strike the bullseye with an eternal truth.
(PJD 15 October 1941)
Letters from Joe again today. It is difficult at this time to discuss this lad of ours with restraint. His letters will tell why. He has so much understanding of people he is so kind and wise beyond his years and has such gay humour. One of the letters was to his mother. It was so understanding so tender without being maudlin.
My partner says he wakes up in cold sweat every night thinking about his son’s danger (he is in the navy) and asked me this morning how I managed to keep my nerve. I did not tell him that there are times when I too get panicky. I am darned if I am going to let anybody know about it. Not even May. (PJD 20 October 1941)
Twenty-Four
Questions and Doubts
The problems of the autumn bombing campaign preyed on Joe’s mind when he was not flying. In October he started filling a notebook with his thoughts, which he characterized as:
merely personal views obtained from limited experience, observation & discussion with my friends. They represent fairly accurately our views. Probably most of them can be shown to be feasible. But I do not imply that the present morale is low – it is not – there is a fine and dashing & enthusiastic spirit. But then we are getting well paid and treated and very little flying in during the winter months – the fact remains we are taking everything nonchalantly, philosophically and in stride but we are in a fast moving, ruthless war – we have to move faster and more accurately and more deadly to crush the enemy. (JJN 3 October 1941)
He began by commenting on Bomber Command’s aircraft.
Halifaxes – Stirlings & Manchesters looked upon with dread and fear by crews because they don’t go high enough or fast enough and are too big and easy a target for the expert German defences. The British should be [building] light fast planes with a high ceiling and a big bomb load per square foot of wing space. I would like to see searchlights pick up a machine travelling 300 mph – It’s duck soup when we go at 150 or so – for them. (JJN 3 October 1941)
Joe’s views of the new heavy bombers, and most especially of the Manchesters to which 5 Group squadrons were converting, were widely shared among aircrews. Perhaps they looked forward to an early conversion to the Lancaster bombers – Manchesters equipped with four engines instead of two – that would soon be coming into service in 5 Group. What Joe was really looking for turned out to be the de Havilland Mosquito, then still in development, and top secret. Perhaps already rumoured among flying crew, it really would travel at over three hundred miles per hour, and much higher than any existing bomber.
Joe also wondered why the offensive was still so hampered by bad weather:
Too many trips or raids are cancelled because of ground fogs over England for the return – the blind landing or Lorenz or an improvement should be available by now. The flat Lincolnshire County with no hills and few obstructions sho
uld at least offer good scope for blind landings – civil air schedules are no longer cancelled because of poor weather. Why should a raid? Just as we had the Germans on the run they were saved or spared by the weather. (JJN 3 October 1941)
106 Squadron crews had been practising with Lorenz since Joe’s arrival, but only for blind approach. It was not yet utilized as a landing aid. So morning fog over the Lincolnshire fens was still a hazard for returning crews. More importantly, the events of the previous month had persuaded him that
Night bombing is no longer accurate – too many valuable trained crews are wasted on unimportant raids – they might be of better use in the Fleet Air Arm or Army Co-op or some specialized task on a special target. Half-hearted raids are not worthwhile. They have to be on a big scale to be effective. (JJN 3 October 1941)
He would have more to say on this topic a couple of weeks later, after the disappointments of his second sortie on Huls and the aborted gardening sortie near Kiel.
The Command seem obsessed with … the affecting of German morale. We disperse our bombing strength by sending out scattered forces on various targets for general effect. Statistics prove few planes reach the target or achieve positive results – proof … lies in the number of visits the RAF keep making to the same target.
Two examples – knapsack1 which provides all or most of the power for the Ruhr & Huls which provides ½ of Germany’s synthetic rubber needs – we continuously bomb these targets with small forces and achieve no results. I have been twice to Huls – it has not been damaged as yet. The same goes for most other targets – we usually drop our bombs in heavy flak or when we do find the target – there is not sufficient bombing strength to bring about decisive results – we have the strength because we sometimes send out 200 & 300 planes but scatter them on different targets – here is what should be done – Knapsack for example should be destroyed – in a suitable period start first with the daylight Blenheims in early evening when target cannot be mistaken. Set the place ablaze with incendiaries – then get low level Hampdens, Wellingtons & Whitleys pasting it in waves and finally have the Stirlings, Manchesters & Halifaxes drop their 4000 pound bombs – simple – effective & quite within our range – losses would be high but no higher than we lose night after night on senseless, indecisive but dangerous and costly operations – (JJN undated [October] 1941)
Joey Jacobson's War Page 28