Bomber Command

by Martin Bowman

  Meanwhile, Ed Murrow’s report of the first Berlin raid that month appeared in the morning edition of the Daily Express under the banner headline, ‘BERLIN – ORCHESTRATED HELL OF LIGHT AND FLAME.’6

  December 1943 had begun quietly for Bomber Command with just 19 Stirlings and a dozen Halifaxes being dispatched to the Frisians and to the east coast of Denmark.7 But on the night of the 3rd/4th over 520 bombers flew another direct route to Berlin before turning off to bomb Leipzig. Several of the 24 bombers that failed to return were shot down by night fighters in the bomber stream before the turn was made. The night fighters were directed to Berlin when the diversionary force of nine Mosquitoes appeared over the German capital and it was believed that only three bombers were shot down in the Leipzig area. More than half of the bombers that went missing on this raid were shot down in the defended area at Frankfurt on the long southern withdrawal route. The Path Finders found and marked Leipzig accurately and the raid was adjudged to be the most successful raid on this distant inland city during the war. The bombers caused considerable damage, particularly to the Junkers factories in the old World Fair exhibition site.

  One Lancaster that should not have made it back was flown by Flight Lieutenant M T Foram raaf of Gilgandra, New South Wales. The Lancaster was first attacked by a Bf 110 not many miles from the target. The first burst of cannon fire killed the rear gunner and set fire to the main plane and petrol tank. The mid-upper gunner, Flight Sergeant M N Williams RAAF of Booleroo, South Australia had a narrow escape. The turret windows were smashed, as was his oxygen mask. Foram gave the order to put on parachutes but the flight engineer saw another Bf 110, which opened fire at 25 yards, causing more damage. With the aircraft on fire Foram knew that he could not go to Leipzig, so despite a fierce barrage, he bombed his alternative target at Dessau instead. On the way home the Lancaster was again attacked. Foram put his aircraft into a dive to throw the fighter off and like a miracle to the crew, the dive put out the fire in the main plane and the petrol tank. When safely past the enemy coast the Lancaster suddenly became extremely unstable and it was decided to come down into the sea but the crew found holes in the dinghy and with a great struggle, Foram kept on his course and landed safely despite a tendency by the Lancaster to turn on its back.8

  The Main Force was prevented from making any major bomber operations until the middle of the month when Berlin was again the target for the Lancasters. With the Main Force stood down on the night of 10/11 December, 617 Squadron were asked to provide four aircraft and crews for SOE arms supply drops to Picardie in Northern France at low level. This required similar levels of expertise to the Dam Busters, even though two of the pilots that Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire duly dispatched to Tempsford in Bedfordshire where they were loaded up with arms and ammunition, had yet to fly an operation. While flying at low altitude E-Easy flown by Flying Officer Gordon Weedon RCAF was hit by flak and crashed killing all the crew, which included two Americans, Warrant Officer Robert Cummings RCAF the rear gunner, and 26-year-old Flight Sergeant Edward Joseph Walters the bomb aimer; both of whom were from Pennsylvania. While trying to establish a pinpoint between Boulogne and St-Pol, O-Orange, which had been one of the Lancasters used on the famous Dams raid in May, was also hit by flak and crashed not far from Doullens. Warrant Officer ‘Chuffy’ Bull and three others were taken into captivity, while one man evaded and two died on the aircraft. Joe McCarthy and ‘Bunny’ Clayton piloting the two other Lancasters could not find the drop area and returned safely. They tried again two nights’ later and were successful.

  On 16/17 December Bomber Command carried out yet another attack on Berlin when over 480 Lancasters and ten Mosquitoes took off for the ‘Big City’. The bomber route again led directly to the capital across Holland and Northern Germany and there were no major diversions. The German controllers planned the course of the bombers with great accuracy; many German fighters were met at the coast of Holland and further fighters were guided in to the bomber stream throughout the approach to the target. More fighters were waiting at Berlin and there were many combats.9 Widespread mist and fog at 150–300 feet in the North German plains reduced the overall effectiveness of the fighter defence and 23 aircraft, mostly Bf 110s had to abandon their sorties prematurely, yet 25 Lancasters were shot down.10 Oberleutnant Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer, Staffelkapitän 12./NJG1 took off from Leeuwarden in a Schräge Musik-equipped Bf 110 with his radar operator, Unteroffizier Fritz Rumpelhardt. They braved low cloud and icing up to 15,000 feet to seek out and shoot down four Lancasters over Friesland Province, with the aid of the ground controller in the night fighter box Polar Bear. Schnaufer’s first victim was a 7 Squadron Lancaster flown by Warrant Officer Wallace Arthur Watson RAAF which was blasted at a range of 4,000 metres and crashed at Follega. The second victim was a 101 Squadron ‘ABC’ Lancaster piloted by Flight Lieutenant Ronald Ernest MacFarlane DFM RCAF which exploded over Banco polder, and the third, O-Orange, a 49 Squadron Lancaster flown by Flying Officer Gordon Lennox Ratcliffe, crashed at Sonnega. All three aircraft went down with their crews. Schnaufer’s fourth victim, 19,700 feet south of Leeuwarden, was N-Nuts on 432 Squadron flown by Flying Officer William Charles Fisher USAAF. His rear gunner spotted the Bf 110 and Fisher corkscrewed violently almost shaking off their pursuer, but Schnaufer holed the petrol tanks and the Lancaster flew over Leeuwarden trailing a sheet of flame to crash at Wytgaard where it disintegrated on impact with the ground as the bomb load exploded. Only one of the eight man crew survived and he was taken prisoner. Schnaufer had to make five attempts to land back at Leeuwarden and then only by a fortuitous hole in the cloud. The four victories took Schnaufer’s total to forty.

  Berlin was cloud covered but the Path Finder sky-marking was reasonably accurate and much of the bombing fell in the city. By this stage of the war sustained bombing by the Allies had made more than a quarter of the capital’s total living accommodation unusable. Bomber losses more than doubled when on their return to England, crews encountered very low cloud at their stations, and 29 Lancasters (and two Stirlings returning from mine-laying operations) either crashed or were abandoned when their crews bailed out. 1, 6 and 8 Groups were particularly badly affected and 29 Lancasters and a Stirling returning from a mine-laying operation either crashed or were abandoned when their crews bailed out. 1 Group south of the Humber in north Lincolnshire lost thirteen aircraft. N-Nuts on 100 Squadron flown by Wing Commander David Holford DSO DFC crashed near Kelstern on approach to Grimsby. Holford was on his third tour and he and four of his crew were killed. The wing commander had been awarded the DFC at 18 and the DSO at 21 and at the age of 22 had finished his second tour; a total of sixty operations.11 Three more Lancasters on the Squadron were lost, H-Harry crashing at Barnoldby le Beck in Lincolnshire killing the pilot and three crew men and injuring three others, and Q-Queenie and F-Freddie colliding near Grimsby. Only one man survived and died of his injuries the following October. A-Apple on 625 Squadron at Kelstern flown by 2nd Lieutenant G E Woolley USAAF crashed into the side of a hill near Gayton-le-Wold in Lincolnshire. Two of the crew died and Woolley was injured. The American pilot and his four injured crew members were taken to Louth County Hospital. B-Baker on 625 Squadron is believed to have crashed at Wetschen near Diepholz. At Bourn 97 Squadron lost eight Lancasters – seven of them in crashes – with 37 men killed and eight injured.

  Arthur Tindall a WOp/AG recalls:

  I can still recall the Met Officer saying that the weather would close in by the early hours of the following morning and he anticipated the raid being cancelled. In the event it wasn’t – with disastrous results. We were airborne for 7 hours 45 minutes compared with usual Berlin raids of 6 to 6½ hours. The following morning our ground crew said that we had less than 50 gallons of petrol. In other words, we were lucky to have made it.

  At Bardney in 5 Group there was no word from B-Beer piloted by Pilot Officer Ian Black or Y-Yorker flown by 20-year-old Pilot Officer Richard Bayldon. Black had taken off at 16.47 hours and
was last heard by Bardney Control calling on W/T at 23.48 hours. Nothing more had been heard. B-Beer was laying smashed to pieces at Salzbergen a few kilometres north-west of Rheine with all seven crew dead. Bayldon, who had taken off four minutes before Black, had crashed at Eberswalde-Finow, 43 kilometres north-east of Berlin. All seven crew including Sergeant Raymond John Baroni RCAF the mid-upper gunner from Glendale, California lay dead in or around the aircraft. When the Los Angeles Times hit the streets back home in California there would be no mention of Baroni or of other Americans on the raid – yet – but banner headlines proclaimed, ‘. . . The attack was described in Berlin as a terror attack on a considerable scale. Well-informed circles point out that it was carried out in poor visibility. Residential quarters in the capital were hit.’ The New York Times reported that, ‘immediately after the attack Berlin broadcast a talk for overseas listeners, saying: “The enemy will never destroy the Berlin population’s will to win. Factories in Germany are working full blast to produce weapons of retaliation, which will come.” ’12

  Worst hit station in 6 Group RCAF in the Tyne Valley and North Yorkshire was Linton-on-Ouse where 426 ‘Thunderbird’ Squadron RCAF lost six Lancasters and 408 ‘Goose’ Squadron RCAF, two. One was lost without trace and the other, which was flown by Flying Officer William John Maitland DFM RCAF who was flying his first sortie of his second tour, crashed in Yorkshire on return while trying to let down through the overcast. There were no survivors. One of the ‘Thunderbird’ Squadron’s Lancasters that failed to return had crashed in Sweden and all the crew was interned. At Gransden Lodge 405 ‘Vancouver’ Squadron RCAF lost three Lancasters and two on 432 ‘Leaside’ Squadron RCAF had been shot down while E-Easy, the other loss, was abandoned out of petrol in the vicinity of Castleton, west-south west of Whitby. Three other Lancasters that did not make it back to Binbrook were on 460 Squadron RAAF. Two of the aircraft crashed in fields in Lincolnshire and a third piloted by Flying Officer Francis Randall DFC RAAF radioed to say that the Lancaster had clipped a tree. Shortly afterwards the aircraft crashed into a wood near Market Stainton south-west of Louth with the loss of all the crew.13

  Flight Sergeant (later Flight Lieutenant) L H Richards, the English navigator on D-Donald on 460 Squadron recalled how his own feelings before and after a raid, surprised him:

  I have always been a coward and was very nervous before every operation. When an operation was scrubbed I was delighted. I dreaded, before each trip, how I would react if we got shot-up or in difficulties and my nerves were as taut as a bowstring throughout every operation. However, when we did meet trouble, to my absolute amazement, my stomach froze but I was as calm as could be, calmer than at any time throughout my tour of operations. I worked like the devil to get us back on course with what instruments were left. When we finally arrived over an airfield in England, the calmness left me and the fear returned. I was quite terrified at the thought of a crash landing and yet I had every confidence that our pilot would manage it. There was such a strange and unreal feeling of fear and confidence. Throughout our whole tour of operations I was pretty certain that we would be killed. All my fear and nerves were unfounded. Each operation was as uneventful as a crosscountry training flight. But there was no comfort in that, I still died thirty deaths just down to cowardice. I suppose I simply couldn’t see us surviving when others were not. Towards the end, say from about 25 operations onwards, I began to see that there was a chance that I would survive a tour. That made each operation more of a nerve wracking experience than ever. I used to calculate the days it would take to complete the remaining operations and to say to myself if I live for just another two weeks I will live forever. Obviously I kept all this from the crew. They had great faith in my ability as a navigator and thought that this and the skill of our pilot would help get us through the tour. I think it was just luck, but the leadership of our pilot throughout was a tremendous example to each member of the crew.

  After a lull in operations, on Monday night, 20/21 December, 650 bomber crews were detailed to attack Frankfurt. Little went to plan. A diversion operation to Mannheim by 44 Lancasters and ten Mosquitoes did not draw fighters away from the route to the target until after the raid was over. The German control rooms were able to plot the bomber force as soon as it left the English coast and they were able to continue plotting it all the way to Frankfurt so that there were many combats on the route to the target. Shortly before approaching the target Pilot Officer Lou Glover’s 9 Squadron Lancaster was swept by cannon and machine gun fire, which set fire to the rear turret and the port inner engine and damaged the intercom system. Harry Wood the rear gunner was injured by splinters in the face and slightly burnt and the mid-upper gunner was hit by a machine gun bullet in the leg. The attack came from astern well down and as soon as Glover saw the tracer he began as corkscrew port, losing height rapidly to gain extra speed, having a full load on. Both gunners saw a Ju 88 approach from astern down but the rear gunner could not fire as his guns had been damaged and the mid-upper gunner could not get his guns to bear. The Ju 88 broke away down and again attacked from the same position, opening fire at 600 yards and closing to 100 yards. His tracers all passed above the Lancaster and he broke away astern down and was not seen again. Glover resumed course on three engines and on written instructions from Flying Officer John Middleton the navigator, bombed Frankfurt from a very low altitude when over the centre of the target area before returning to Bardney. The rear turret was badly smashed, the port inner engine u/s and the mid-upper gunner’s turret and the fuselage was holed in many places.14

  The Path Finders prepared a ground-marking plan on the basis of a forecast giving clear weather but at Frankfurt they found up to 8/10ths cloud. The Germans lit a decoy fire site five miles south-east of the city and they also used dummy target indicators. In a period of barely 40 minutes, 2,200 tons of HE and incendiary bombs were dropped on Frankfurt. Some of the bombing fell around the decoy but part of the creep back fell on Frankfurt causing more damage than Bomber Command realized at the time. It is believed that the main gasworks in Frankfurt blew up 20 minutes after the attack began. The explosion was clearly perceptible up to an altitude of almost 20,000 feet. Over 460 houses were completely destroyed and 1,948 seriously damaged in Frankfurt and the outlying townships of Sachsenhausen and Offenbach, and 23,000 people were bombed out. Some 117 bombs hit various industrial premises and a large number of cultural, historical and public buildings were hit including the cathedral, the city library, the city hospital and no fewer than 69 schools. One squadron ran under the hail of flak and flew over the Hauptbanhof, or chief train station, at an altitude of 975 feet. They raced along the Kaiserstrasse, which a few minutes later had turned into a single sea of flame. Part of the bombing fell on Mainz 17 miles to the west and many houses along the Rhine waterfront and in southern suburbs were hit.

  Altogether, 41 aircraft failed to return from the raid on Frankfurt. At Holme-on-Spalding Moor three Halifax Vs on 76 Squadron never returned. At Breighton 78 Squadron had four Halifaxes missing while another stalled and crashed while waiting for permission to land after returning just after take-off. All seven crew died in the impact. Z-Zebra piloted by 1st Lieutenant Lauchlin M Kelly USAAF was hit by flak at 18,000 feet while still carrying its bomb load. The skinny young university student from a comfortable home in Baltimore, Maryland managed to level out at around 14,000 feet. He ordered the crew to bail out and said that he was going to try and put the Halifax down but he was killed when the aircraft exploded and crashed on the edge of the Odersberg Forest near the Dutch-Belgian border. The six crew men came down safely and they were taken prisoner. Kelly, who was posthumously promoted to major, was buried locally on Christmas Eve but after the war his remains were taken to the US Military Cemetery at Margratan before he was re-interred in America.

  Another American expatriate on the squadron was Sergeant W Heubner USAAF, who was taken prisoner when M-Mother was downed by flak at 19,000 feet over the target and later finished off
by a night fighter flown by Oberleutnant Werner Baake of I./NJG1 at Venlo. Heubner’s pilot, Flight Lieutenant J G Smith and one other crew member evaded capture and the rest were taken prisoner.15

  Squadron Leader Julian Sale DSO on 35 Squadron, who had returned to operations after he was shot down on 12/13 May and evaded capture, crash-landed his blazing Halifax at Graveley with a fire in the bomb bay. Hung-up TIs had exploded as the aircraft came below their barometric fuse altitude of 1,500 feet. Sale’s navigator was Flight Lieutenant Gordon Carter DFC* who had also evaded capture and had returned to operations after being shot down on 13/14 February 1943. His Skipper ordered the crew to bail out but Flight Lieutenant Roger ‘Sheep’ Lamb the mid-upper gunner appeared beside him with a charred parachute, so Sale dropped back into his seat, stuck his head out of the port window of the smoke-filled cockpit and calmly brought the Halifax in for a normal circuit landing before roaring off the runway and crashing in a ball of fire. Sale and Lamb got away safely before the bomber exploded. All five men who bailed out were safe and only the rear gunner suffered any injury. Sale was awarded a bar to his DSO for his action.

  At Skellingthorpe two Lancasters on 50 Squadron failed to return. One was C-Charlie flown by Pilot Officer John Llewellyn Heckendorf RAAF from Lockhart in New South Wales. English Sergeant Arthur Hope was proud of their ‘smashing’ crew and his wish would be that ‘if anything was coming, that it would come to all of them’. On Frankfurt they carried a replacement bomb aimer but the rest of the crew was much as it was when they first flew together in May 1943. Sergeant John Henderson the flight engineer had joined C-Charlie’s crew that July. Flight Sergeant Robert Campbell Turner the rear gunner was the only other Australian crew member. C-Charlie burst into flames at 19,000 feet near Kelsterbach about 13 kilometres from Frankfurt and the order to bail out was given. But in seconds the Lancaster exploded killing everyone on board except for Flying Officer R L Rutherford and Arthur Hope who were thrown clear. Happily for Hope who had ‘wanted to “go”, if they had to, as a crew’, his wish had not been granted. Both he and Rutherford were taken into captivity by the Germans.