One aircraft had crashed on take-off at the start of the operation to Düsseldorf. The operation included a special force of 38 Lancaster IIs in 3 and 6 Groups equipped with the G-H navigational device, which after a successful trial in the winter of 1943, had been withdrawn until enough sets could be produced to equip a large force of bombers. G-H was a set that transmitted and received pulses from two ground stations. By plotting the point at which the two intersected, the aircraft’s ground position could be plotted quite accurately. Aircraft without G-H were to formate on a G-H ‘Leader’ and release their bombs in unison. The Mannesmann tubular steel works on Düsseldorf’s northern outskirts was selected to test this precision device for the first time on a considerable scale. Five of the G-H Lancasters however, had to return early and two were lost while equipment failures in 16 aircraft reduced the numbers bombing on G-H to 15 although these left a number of assembly halls burnt out. Photographs taken after the raid showed that half the bombs aimed by means of G-H had fallen within half a mile of the aiming point. By October 1944 most of the Lancasters of 3 Group had been equipped with this important new aid. All 52 Lancasters, including 20 blind-markers plus ten Mosquitoes that were detailed to carry out a feint attack on Cologne ten minutes before the start of the main raid, returned safely. Thirteen Oboe-equipped Mosquitoes that were detailed to hit Rheinhausen and two more, equipped with G-H that went to Dortmund also returned without loss, as did 23 Stirlings and Lancasters that sowed mines off the Friesians.
A Victoria Cross was awarded to Glasgow-born pilot Flight Lieutenant William ‘Bill’ Reid RAFVR on 61 Squadron whose Lancaster O-Oboe was twice attacked by night fighters en route to Düsseldorf but who, despite severe head wounds, pressed on, bombed the target and brought the badly damaged aircraft back to Shipdham airfield with the help of the crew. Flight Sergeant John Alan Jeffreys the 30-year-old navigator, a former teacher from Perth, Australia, was killed by a bullet through his skull. Sergeant Jimmy Mann the 22-year-old wireless operator from Orrell near Liverpool died of his injuries 24 hours later. Bomb aimer Les Rolton from Romford, Essex whose cherubic features caused him to be known as ‘Baby face’, was hit in the hand by shrapnel. Sergeant Jim Norris the 22-year-old Welsh flight engineer, who was badly wounded, was awarded an immediate CGM. He had worked in the railway goods yard in his home city of Cardiff before joining up and was Reid’s second flight engineer, having replaced the previous young incumbent when the 19-year-old was labelled LMF after just the one op. Flight Sergeant Cyril Baldwin from Nelson in Lancashire was the mid-upper-gunner. Short in stature, with almost white hair and known to one and all as ‘Blondie’, he and Flight Sergeant Frank Emerson the rear gunner from Enfield, Middlesex, would often swap turret positions before an op. Emerson, who was known as ‘Joe’ for his dark moustache, which had been compared to Stalin’s, was awarded the DFM.
AVM Cochrane had visited Reid after Düsseldorf. Reid recalled. ‘He said he’d heard my story from the rest of the crew, but he wanted to hear it from me. He asked me why I didn’t turn back and I said that I’d thought it was safer to go on, rather than turning back among all the other planes; I mean eight or ten miles of aircraft all flying in the same direction. I said if one of the engines had packed up I’d have turned round right away, but the Lanc was still flying. It wasn’t that I was determined to drop the bombs or anything, but I just thought it was the safest thing to do at that time. Then he said. ‘You know Reid, the returns from ops have been practically nil since your raid. It’s as if they all said, “That bugger Jock, he went on even though he was wounded, so we can’t turn back just because of a faulty altimeter, or something like that.” ’31
On the night of 4/5 November the RAF carried out mining of the western Baltic, with a Mosquito ‘spoof’ towards the Ruhr. At 18.19 hours German radar picked up 50 to 60 RAF aircraft between Cap Griz Nez and the Westerschelde River at 23,000 to 30,000 feet. Their further course was southeast into the southern Ruhr area. As their speed at first was only about 250 mph they were taken to be four-engined bombers but later, taking headwinds into consideration, the defences identified them as Mosquitoes. Several night fighters in the area of the western Ruhr were ordered to take off but the operation was abandoned after the approaching aircraft were identified as Mosquitoes. Meanwhile, at 18.02–18.40 hours, 30 to 50 aircraft at heights between 3,300 feet and 5,000 feet flying at 200 mph were picked up approaching the northern part of west Jutland by German radar. 2 JD occupying two night fighter boxes in Jutland were scrambled to take on the heavies. They engaged 16 bombers and shot down four without loss.
Decorated airmen forced themselves through a tour or tours of duty at a cost that they did not know was to come. Their lives would be shattered for the whole of their existence after the war. Certain people said, ‘Oh Yes, I’ll finish,’ and they did but by and large the attitude was ‘No I won’t finish but I won’t go tonight and I won’t go tomorrow night.’ At one station a few of the air crew would play a record by the ‘Ink Spots’ called ‘For all you know we may never meet again.’ After briefing they would play this record over and over again until one night one of the officers got so fed up that he took the record and smashed it over his knee. He did not return from his next trip. One Australian airman recalls: ‘You’d overhear someone say, “I don’t expect to see home again.” I said, “What’s that? You make your own arrangements; I’m going home!” “Oh I can see you are going to go home. Everyone can see that you are going home but I won’t be.”’ Air crew rarely spoke openly about dying. In fact the word was rarely mentioned. In RAF parlance they either ‘got the chop’, ‘bought it’ or ‘went for a Burton’. The ‘Chop Blonde’ was the girl who when anyone went out with her they would end up getting the ‘chop’.
Jan Birch was a young WAAF officer who fell in love with Pilot Officer Colin Geoffrey Finch on 27 OTU Litchfield whom she met at a dance on her station. ‘I was only engaged to Colin for one day’ she recalls. ‘I was told that there had been an accident at the aerodrome [on 6 November] and perhaps I should not come back until the next day but I wanted to come back. I was fearful inside but I thought that he had been injured.’ Finch was one of five Aussies on the Wellington piloted by Group Captain P G Heffernan RAAF. They carried a passenger, Section Officer Karen Lia Hughes, a WAAF. Heffernan had taken the Wimpy off and at 22.08 hours was involved in a mid-air collision with another Wellington of 26 OTU at Wing piloted by Sergeant R B Main RCAF. Both aircraft crashed near the main gate at Alconbury. Heffernan and Main were badly injured but they survived; all the others on board the two Wellingtons were killed.32 When Jan Birch got to the Lichfield mess she thought that there could not be anything terrible because she heard jazz music, dancing and hilarity coming from inside:
I went in and was taken aside by a friend, a WAAF officer, who told me that Colin had been killed. It was immediately horrifying, hearing that music, which absolutely jarred with this personal sorrow. On the other hand, I had learnt earlier that this had to go on. After I had gone to my room and released some of the emotion I realized that this is how it had to be. If one went into mourning or stopped life going on in the normal way on the station; well you would have had no morale at all. It was the same in London and all the cities that were bombed. You couldn’t just go into deep mourning because personal tragedies were happening all the time.
Whilst Jack Furner was at Exning in November 1943, a new Group was formed in Bomber Command. It was known as 100 Group, with its Headquarters at Bylaugh Hall near East Dereham in Norfolk. The Group’s task was to bring together various squadrons and units, some existing, others still to be formed, that were to fight a secret war of electronics and radar countermeasures, attempting to reduce the losses of the heavy bombers and their crews.33
Sergeant Maurice Flower, an ex-‘Halton Brat’ was flight engineer in Flying Officer Chick Webster’s Halifax crew, which joined 192 Squadron in 100 Group at Foulsham, Norfolk in February 1944. In January 1939 the local vicar helped Maurice apply for the
aircraft apprenticeship at Halton and he ‘fiddled it’ so that he sat the examination in his study instead of having to go to Newcastle. If he had not been accepted by the RAF he would have been a miner or worked alongside his father at the Co-op. There was not much else. There was his grandfather’s farm but that was well staffed. His other grandfather was an under-manager at the colliery and who took young Flower to the bottom of the shaft where he said ‘You can take me back up again!’ That was as far as he ever went in mining. He could not understand anybody lying on their backs hacking away at a coal seam:
The air force really was a way of changing my whole life. I was just interested in the aeroplanes and joined as a fitter to airframes as an apprentice. The apprenticeship was originally for three years but the war broke out and they reduced it to two. There were about 2,000 of us and I did about a year at Halton and a year at Cosford.
Later I was on the Empire Training Scheme at Bloemfontein but it was like being in a peacetime air force. There was no thrill in it at all! We couldn’t get spares and although we had good food, lots of entertainment and every amenity, even electric lights at night, it got a bit boring. One day they wanted volunteers for aircrew, especially flight engineers so I volunteered and came home with about half a dozen others. We didn’t have any air experience but we were expected to know everything about bombers on day one and just start work! Having just spent a couple of years in South Africa, Norfolk was daunting to say the least. The locals were smashing; really friendly people. The ‘Unicorn’ was our watering hole and dear old ‘Ma’ the landlady was a godsend to our crew. But Foulsham airfield and the facilities were just god awful. Everywhere and everything seemed to be either wet or damp after 9 am. Newspapers were like a dish cloth, a light trail of spray followed a snooker ball down the table and condensation dripped on to your bed from corrugated roofs of billets if your bed was more than three feet from the stove.
Four of the crew, including my Skipper were Canadian. Three of us were British. Percy Gladstone, the navigator, was a Cree Indian. I don’t know whether he was a full Cree but he looked like an Indian with jet-black hair. He taught himself to speak English from a Sears Roebuck catalogue and taught himself right through university and got a degree. He was a fantastic navigator. We’d go into the woods and he could walk up to a wild rabbit and pick it up off the floor and stroke it and then he’d put it down and let it go and it would sit and look at him. I don’t know whether he hypnotised them or what he did but he had this knack. I was closer to my crew than I was with my own brother and sisters. You relied so much on each other. You flew as a team and this extended to your private life. You’d do things together, help each other out. You’d get the odd brawl in a pub but the crews would always stand back to back and help each other. We got seven days’ leave every six weeks and one time I went home and all the Canadians went with me, mainly because I said we had an ice rink in Durham. So we went skating in this ice rink, which had a canvas roof, like a circus tent with big poles supporting the roof. I really couldn’t skate but I could stand upright and I was on the end of the stream. All seven of us did this big whirling circle with me on the far end. I must have been doing about 55 mph and I hit one of these poles and the whole roof came down. That was the end of our skating!
192 Squadron was called ‘Bomber Support’. We supported the main stream, jamming the German radar and interfering with the fighter command broadcasts. One or two aircraft from the squadron would fly into the target, with maybe 500 Lancasters. We’d fly independently of the bomber stream into the target and then circle the target. That was quite hair-raising because you’d got 500 aeroplanes channelling in over a target and you were going in with them and then turning left, across the front of them and then going up the opposite way and then turning left again across them and flying round and round whilst the raid was in progress.
As a squadron we didn’t normally carry bombs. We dropped Window by the ton and it appeared on the German radar screens like a huge bomber force, even though it was just one aircraft. They’d send their fighters up to intercept this ‘bomber force’, which didn’t exist because the Window just drifted to the ground and then suddenly disappeared but they’d used up all their petrol and had to go back and refuel. While they were doing that, the real force was carrying out a raid elsewhere. We also carried a ‘special operator’ and all his equipment. Jock Mullholland would sit hunched over his equipment with a rubber face piece on, staring into these little green cathode tubes and twiddling knobs. I really didn’t know what we were doing on any one trip but apparently it was important. I’m sure that none of the rest of the crew knew what we were there for either; only the special operator actually knew. When we did eight-or nine-hour trips in the Bay of Biscay we flew from Cornwall; they were so tedious. The Germans were bringing ball bearings from Sweden down to Spain and Portugal and would fly up the Bay of Biscay and home on a beam. We’d pick up this beam and bend it out into the Atlantic so that the big four-engine Condors ran out of petrol halfway to America. We peed in cider bottles and threw them out through the flare chutes. If the bung was left off, they would whistle on the way down.
In the morning we had briefings but we wouldn’t know the target at that stage. It was on the board but covered up. The worst moment was when the string pulled the curtain back and we saw where the target was. You’d think, ‘Oh blimey, not that one again. I was all shot to hell the last time I was there.’ It was really terrifying, that moment. After the briefings and before the flight, I did pre-flight checks around and in the aircraft, checking it thoroughly. I’d make sure the tanks were full so that we had a fuel load according to the length of the trip with a bit of spare for getting back. It was a routine that you got into very quickly and, having been ground crew it was just second nature to look for the things you knew had a tendency to go wrong on a regular basis. In the afternoon, we showered and put clean underwear on. If one got hit by a bullet one wanted a clean vest for it to go through to stop any nasty stuff getting into the wound. Then we’d go for the final briefing and have a pre-op meal, which was usually bacon and eggs. Originally they gave us chips on pre-flight meals but at 22,000 feet this didn’t work too well on the stomach! The smell got to be a bit obnoxious in the aeroplane, so we said, ‘Please, no more chips on pre-op meals!’ We’d make do with bacon and egg. The poor civilians never got bacon and eggs or a chocolate ration but we did. I never ate mine as it always used to make me thirsty. When we were flying out over Holland, I always bunged my chocolate ration down the flare shoot and I’d send the rest of the crew’s chocolate down as well if I could cadge it off them. Long after the war I was in Holland at a reunion and I got talking to a Dutchman. I asked if there had been any high spots during the war. The Dutch had had a terrible time, almost starved to death by the Germans. I met one old lady who had actually boiled her husband’s boots to try and make some gravy. Anyway, this chap said he was coming home from school one day and he found two bars of Cadburys chocolate. He said that was the most beautiful thing he remembered from the whole war.
We loved the Halifax. I personally would never have wanted to fly in a Lancaster. Everyone I’ve known that flew Halifaxes loved them, apart from the Mark Is, which had the Merlin engines. They weren’t so good but once they got the Bristol Hercules engine, they were a real winner. They would take an awful amount of punishment, very strong aeroplanes. The Halifax didn’t carry the load that the Lancaster did, mainly due to its construction but it was a strong, robust aeroplane. I would assist the pilot on take-off, opening up the throttles and correcting the swing on take-off that always happened with the Halifax. Then I’d work out, according to the distance and the hours we expected to fly, the engine settings needed for the trip, to make the fuel last out. I’d check the fuel and keep a log of the instrument settings every half-hour. I’d also change tanks as needed from one tank to another and carry out general maintenance. Changing tanks was quite a performance on the Halifax. First of all, you’d unplug your oxy
gen from the main supply and put on a bottle that you hoped had oxygen in it. You had to carry this little bottle and climb over the main spar, lie down on your stomach on the floor and reach underneath the main spar and you had to do it all in the dark, just by touch. Over the target and during take-off and landing we used to fly on numbers one and three tanks, which were the main big tanks and then we’d bring the smaller tanks in. It was quite a business.
We were coned one night over Düsseldorf by about fifty searchlights. Another navigator timed us and said we were in this cone for twelve and a half minutes, which in a thirty ton aeroplane was hard going. The normal survival rate for being trapped in a cone before you were shot down was three minutes. We got out of the cone eventually but the aircraft was just a mess. Everything that was loose was stuck to the roof or under the spars. The pilot climbed and dived and rolled and did every manoeuvre we could think of to get out of it. He was exhausted. Suddenly he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this’ and he jettisoned the top hatch so he could parachute out but I grabbed his legs and the bomb aimer helped me throw him down the stairs. I took over the controls of the aircraft and flew halfway back over the North Sea, by which time the pilot had recovered from the ordeal enough to be able to take control back and land. He was lucky to recover and even luckier that his crew stood by him, keeping the incident to ourselves. We didn’t mention it when we got back. If we had, he’d have been grounded. We were fairly well through the tour by then and well knit. He just cracked; he’d had enough. We couldn’t blame him. We debriefed and went to bed and that was it. The next time he was fine; he just carried on for the rest of the tour, no trouble at all.
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