Aircrew: The Story of the Men Who Flew the Bombers

by Bruce Lewis

  On pitch black nights, in freezing temperatures, it was a case of ‘dead reckoning’, working out in theory just where you were by making use of forecast winds, and nothing else. As likely as not, even the radio would be out of action, its aerial a useless icicle. Yet even these crude facilities were usually sufficient to get a crew somewhere over Germany and back again to England on a ‘bumph chucking’ trip. Exactly where the leaflets fell was not critical. Later, when specific targets for bombing raids had to be located, it was another matter. Then, and only after a long period of self-delusion by Bomber Command, did the gross inaccuracies of nighttime navigation across Europe become shatteringly obvious.

  It was no fault of the men who flew those early missions that aircraft so often failed to reach their targets. With the lack of direction-finding aids it was rather like, as one navigator put it, ‘sitting in a freezing cold stair cupboard with the door shut and the Hoover running and trying to do calculus.’ Never in the history of war was a man called upon to carry out such complicated calculations in the midst of battle.

  When I flew in bombers as a wireless operator I was able to observe at close quarters the unimaginable stress under which a navigator worked for long periods of time. He had to maintain an almost superhuman detachment, even when the enemy was doing his best to destroy the aircraft in which he was working, and when his pilot was twisting and turning and diving and climbing in a corkscrewing effort to escape that destruction.

  In those earlier days of war, before the Germans had honed their night defence system into the deadly weapon that it later became, the most terrifying enemy the bomber crews had to face was appalling weather. 1940/41 produced the worst winter in living memory. The men flying the Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens had to struggle through endless blankets of fog and fight fierce head-winds that reduced the forward speed of the already slow aircraft to almost nothing.

  Ice was the worst menace. It formed in thick layers on the wings. It turned hydraulic systems to jelly; gun turrets, bomb doors, undercarriages all stopped working. It formed an opaque sheen over Perspex windows, making it impossible to see out. Ice played havoc with instruments and the radio.

  Frostbite was not uncommon among those who flew in these pioneer bombers. Hands were encased first of all in a silk glove, over this a woollen glove, and finally a thick leather gauntlet. In order to carry out some essential duties, plotting a course on a chart for instance, writing up a signals log, or accurately tapping out a message on a morse key, this protective clothing had to be removed. If a bare hand inadvertently touched a metal part of the aircraft it would freeze to that object immediately.

  I remember one of my first night cross-countries in a Wellington, while training at OTU. We had each been provided with a pack of sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper with an outer cover of newspaper. In addition we were given a small tin of concentrated orange juice. It must have been around 3 am when I felt the need for refreshment. I reached for the fire axe and aimed a blow at the top of the tin, making a suitable hole through which to pour the liquid. It was a waste of time. The orange juice had frozen into a solid block. Unwrapping the sandwiches I discovered they were encased in a frosty covering of crystals and were as hard as stone. When I hit them with the axe, sharp splinters of bread flew all over the cabin. We were flying in an airborne refrigerator.

  Although this book concentrates on the aircrew who flew in the heavy bombers of Bomber Command and the American 8th Air Force, it would be churlish not to say a word about a couple of machines flown by men of the RAF in the initial stages of the war. One of these was the Bristol Blenheim.

  The Blenheim was generally unable to join its bigger brothers under the protective cover of darkness. Its range was limited and, when the strategic bombing policy began in earnest, its bomb-carrying capacity was too restricted. It carried only 1000 lbs of bombs, compared with up to 7000 lbs lifted by a Whitley. Yet in spite of these shortcomings, the twin-engine Blenheim was a compact, business-like medium bomber, which, a few years earlier, had been acclaimed a world beater. It was Britain’s first modern, all-metal stressed-skin military aircraft. It was faster than any other RAF bomber of those days, which was just as well, because its defensive armament was disgracefully inadequate.

  So the men who flew in Blenheims, pilot, observer and wireless operator/air gunner, had to go on facing the perils of daylight operations. Once the ‘phoney’ war was over and all-out bombing began, the crews of the Blenheims kept up an unremitting attack on enemy-occupied channel ports and targets near the coast. Any gentlemanly agreement relating to bombing restrictions had come to an end when the Germans bombed Rotterdam on 15 May, 1940. During the Battle of Britain Blenheim squadrons played a vital role in making sure that England was not invaded by the Germans. They, and the crews of Wellingtons, destroyed hundreds of motorised barges concentrated by the enemy for that purpose.

  The stalwart Bristol Blenheim remained in action until August, 1942, when its intruder role over Europe was taken on by the American-built Douglas Boston flown by RAF crews. But the Blenheim continued to serve overseas long after this time.

  In those early days Britain had yet another bomber, the Fairey Battle. Also manned by a crew of three, the aircraft was classed as a light bomber. It was powered by a single Merlin engine. Ten squadrons of Battles, of which the RAF had more than any other bomber, were sent to France at the outbreak of war, along with a number of Blenheims. They formed the Advanced Air Striking Force in support of the French Army, and were no longer part of Bomber Command. In fact, Bomber Command only rarely used the Battle in an operational capacity.

  The Fairey Battle looked so advanced, so clean in outline, more like a long, elegant fighter than a bomber, that no one could fail to be impressed by its appearance. As a schoolboy my favourite Dinky Toy was a model of a Fairey Battle. Later I thanked God that I was born too late to fly in combat in one of those underpowered, unprotected machines. The courage of the crews who flew to their death in Battles has never been fully acknowledged.

  In the Spring of 1940, when the Germans invaded the Low Countries, the Advanced Air Striking Force was thrown into the battle to try to stem the enemy onslaught. They bombed supply columns and lines of communication. The losses among the Battles and Blenheims reached horrific proportions. They were shot out of the sky, either by withering fire from the mobile flak batteries, or as a result of relentless attacks by Messerschmitt 109 fighters, whose superior fire-power and speed left the Battles, in particular, with almost no hope of survival.

  On 12 May, 1940, the CO of 12 Squadron told his men that it was vital to destroy two large bridges that spanned the Albert Canal near Maastricht in Holland. This was the only chance of stemming the Wehrmacht’s headlong advance. Making no bones of the fact that the mission was suicidal, he called for volunteers. Every pilot, observer and wireless operator/air gunner in the squadron stepped forward.

  Six crews were picked for the job. The Battles took off. In spite of intense opposition, one of the bridges was hit and partly destroyed. None of the aircraft returned from that mission. One of the pilots, 21-year-old Flying Officer D.E Garland, and his observer, Sergeant T. Gray were each posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross – the first to be won by the RAF in the Second World War. Their wireless operator/air gunner, Leading Aircraftman L. R. Reynolds, who also died, received no such recognition.

  This was the quality of aircrew transferred from Bomber Command to other duties. The command could ill afford to lose such men.

  Over the course of the coming years the frittering away of men and machines was to continue in other ways. Crews, after being expensively trained in Bomber Command’s own operational training units, were then not infrequently transferred to Coastal Command, or sent overseas.

  Thus the efforts to build up Bomber Command’s strength until it was equal to the immense task it had set itself, that of bringing Germany to her knees by strategic bombing, was constantly frustrated by factors quite unrelated to losse
s caused through enemy action.

  I witnessed one or two examples of this ‘filching’ during my training. On one occasion some of us were asked if we would be prepared to transfer for duties with the army, serving as wireless operators in tanks fighting in the Western Desert. A few of our number volunteered to go, relishing the chance of immediate action. These young men were unhappy at the prospect of at least another year’s training in the RAF before seeing active service.

  By the end of the Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe, too, had been taught by our fighter pilots that daylight bombing attacks were too costly in men and machines, even when the German bombers were accompanied by large fleets of escorting fighters. From then on, until their services were required the following year in Russia, the Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers also sought the cover of night to bomb British cities.

  Previously, during the Battle of Britain, the German bomber force had concentrated on trying to destroy the RAF fighter fields in south-east England. Such was the intensity of the onslaught that Fighter Command was at one time in a critical situation.

  On the night of 25/26 August, 1940, a force of forty-three British bombers, made up of Whitleys, Hampdens and Wellingtons, bombed Berlin. Six of the Hampdens, flying to the limit of their fuel capacity, were lost. Material damage to the cloud-covered city was negligible, yet the psychological effect on the Nazi leader was profound. The effrontery shown by British airmen in daring to fly 600 miles into the Fatherland to drop high explosive on the Third Reich’s capital city was too much for Adolf Hitler. Angrily he ordered his Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring, to retaliate with all his strength against London – only a few miles away from his front-line airfields in France.

  Göring was anxious to restore his tarnished prestige. Previously he had confidently told Hitler that the RAF fighter force would be smashed in two weeks. This had not happened. On the contrary, because of the activities of that same fighter force, Luftwaffe bombers and their escorting fighters had fallen from the British skies in their hundreds since early August. And now another of the Reichsmarschall’s famous boasts, that ‘not a single bomb will fall on Germany’, had been blown apart by Bomber Command.

  The commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe eagerly ordered round-the-clock bombing of London in the belief that the RAF’s stock of Spitfires and Hurricanes was almost depleted. Calculating that his enemy had only about a hundred fighters left, he underestimated by at least ten times. Also, by switching tactics at this crucial stage, by bombing the city and leaving the RAF airfields and control centres unmolested, he relieved Fighter Command of its most worrying problem, and in so doing he lost the battle.

  Obliged in the end to concentrate on night bombing, the Luftwaffe inflicted severe suffering on the people of London. By the end of the year 13,000 citizens had been killed and a further 16,000 seriously injured. Many homes were destroyed, especially in the poorer areas of the East End. Numerous historic buildings were reduced to rubble. The docks suffered badly too, but Britain had other ports. In addition, much of Britain’s war industry was situated elsewhere, well away from London, particularly in the Midlands and the North.

  Far from lowering civilian morale or causing panic, the common hardships inflicted by the bombing united Londoners in their determination to win through in the end. This indomitable spirit was equally evident among the people of all the ‘blitzed’ cities of Britain, Birmingham, Liverpool, Plymouth, Bristol, Swansea and Coventry, which in a single night lost 500 people, and a further 1,200 injured. 60,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged, a third of the city’s factories were put out of action, and the ancient cathedral ruined. Yet, when 10,000 people were offered transport to leave the devastated city on the following day, only about 300 took up the offer.

  There were no arguments at that time about it being morally wrong to bomb Germany. Such academic ‘afterthoughts’ only emerged when victory was in sight.

  In their early night raids on the British Isles the German crews had three advantages: short flying distances to their targets; little effective interference from Britain’s primitive night defences; and an ingenious but simple system of intersecting radio beams that guided the Luftwaffe bombers to their targets. The first of these, the Knickebein, was soon countered by British scientists, but then a more accurate device known as X-Verfahren was introduced by the Germans and used to devastating effect against Coventry.

  One member of our family had good reason to remember the consequences of what she insisted afterwards was the result of our scientists ‘bending the beam’. This was a common expression at the time among the civilian population for what was supposedly being done by the ‘boffins’ to divert the German bombers from their targets.

  Auntie Annie lived on her own in a remote hill farm high on the mountains above the town of Llangollen in North Wales. One night the ‘Jerries’started to bomb Auntie Annie. Showing great courage, my Uncle Trevor, who lived in the valley, commandeered a wheel chair and lugged it up the mountainside to rescue the old lady. As he said afterwards, ‘With bombs exploding all round, I would never have believed it possible to come down a mountain so quickly, while guiding a wheelchair occupied by an elderly relative.’

  An official postmortem on the raid came to the conclusion that the intended target had been the Mersey docks in Liverpool. It was a bright moonlight night at the time of the attack, and on that particular mountain there are large outcroppings of dark grey rock. It was thought that the German crews, thanks to a little ‘scientific misdirection’, had mistaken these dark patches for clusters of shipping moored in the River Mersey. I am pleased to report that both my aunt and her farm escaped without serious damage. Many rocks were badly splintered and two sheep were killed.

  It is interesting to examine the positions occupied by the various crew members in Luftwaffe bombers. In the Junkers 88, for example, all four airmen occupied the same cockpit in the nose. The pilot sat high on the left, with the navigator close beside him or prone when bomb-aiming. The flight engineer was stationed just behind the pilot. He was also responsible for manning the upper rear gun. The wireless operator was to the engineer’s right, from where, when necessary, he could struggle down to fire the lower rear gun at the back end of the bombsight gondola. Similar seating arrangements also applied in Heinkels and Dorniers.

  So German crews flew into battle literally shoulder to shoulder. This feature had been introduced into Luftwaffe bomber designs for two reasons. One was to facilitate crew communication, both visual and oral. The other was a belief that flying in such close proximity would help to sustain morale. Panic, it was thought, would be less likely to break out in the chummy environment of a shared cabin.

  As a result of hard experience gained in the Battle of Britain, armament was substantially increased. At one time the unfortunate engineer was made responsible for manning no less than five separate hand-held guns. There must have been moments when the clatter and confusion in the ‘cosy cabin’, especially when a wounded comrade fell into your lap, produced a totally different effect on morale from that envisaged by the chairborne psychologists.

  By contrast, crew members of RAF night bombers, with the exception of the Hampden, were more isolated. The gunners, particularly, led a lonely life in their power-operated turrets – a form of defensive armament not used on German bombers. Navigators and wireless operators worked in close proximity, as of course did the pilot and second pilot, until the latter was replaced by the flight engineer when the four-engined ‘Heavies’ took to the air. The bomb-aimer, when he arrived on the scene later in the war and took over responsibility from the navigator for dropping the bombs, usually stayed in his nose compartment except during take-off and landing. Aircrew kept in touch with each other via ‘intercom’ – an electrical inter-communication system.

  Bomber Command may have been suffering disappointments and frustrations at that time, but these were shared by the German flyers too. Colonel Werner Baumbach, one of Germany’s finest bomber pilots, wrote:


  Hitler talked about ‘extirpating’ the English towns, and propaganda coined the word ‘coventrizing’ for the maximum degree of destruction which was deemed to have been inflicted on Coventry. In this night-bombing during that winter London figured pre-eminently in the German communiques and reports on the progress of the Luftwaffe’s ‘wearing-down’strategy – which was not in fact achieving its purpose … The mining of the Thames estuary and the Wash and attacks on shipping on moonlight nights were continued. Night bombing of various targets was intensified, though the English fighters and AA defences were continuously improving while the efficiency of the Luftwaffe was rapidly decreasing. …

  At the beginning of 1941 the Luftwaffe High Command had to admit that England could not be reduced to impotence solely by night bombing, carried out as it was by inadequate forces … the German air war against her had failed.

  The battle over England cannot be compared even remotely with what was to happen to Germany from 1942 onwards.

  This was the assessment of a Luftwaffe pilot who was later to become ‘General of Bombers’.

  Inadequate those German raids against England may seem with hindsight, yet they inflicted more damage than Bomber Command was able to match when attacking targets in Germany during that period. In one raid on Berlin most of the bombs fell in the surrounding countryside, a few of which destroyed some farms. The topical joke in the German capital was: ‘Now they are trying to starve us out!’

  Nothing daunted, as the winter of 1940 set in, RAF bombers continued to beat their way across Germany in defiance of the worsening weather. On occasion the targets were never found, or places were bombed up to a hundred miles from the designated aiming point – without the crews ever realizing they were in error. Blacked-out Germany remained mysterious, remote and vast beneath them. The signposts of radar, which were to become the guides of the future, were almost undreamed of then.