Bomber Command (10 page)
Bomber Command and its leading airmen, however, would be judged not by comparison with the Luftwaffe but by the standard
of their own pre-war promises. The core of Trenchard’s thesis was that it was unnecessary first to defeat the enemy’s air force in order to wage an effective bomber offensive, and – by implication revealed in the RAF’s conduct of its own affairs between the wars – that it was not necessary to concentrate much attention where the bombs fell on enemy territory in order to achieve the desired results. Now, the airmen perceived with bleak clarity that they had made no attempt to reconcile their ends with the means available to achieve these. Nothing would persuade them to renounce their purpose before the Government or the other two services. But by the spring of 1940, the Air Staff’s confident strategy of twenty years’ standing had been replaced by a courageous yet empty determination to make the best of a bad job, and pray for the time to build the means to pursue their great strategic ambitions.
Only Trenchard’s sublime faith flew on unshakeable. In 4 April 1940 one of his protégés, Sir Charles Portal, succeeded Ludlow-Hewitt as Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. Trenchard wrote to congratulate Portal on his first month in his post, and on the achievements of British air power ‘. . . though I am sorry that you could not use it where I and others think it probably would have ended the war by now.’ Britain, Trenchard still believed, had missed a unique opportunity to achieve immediate victory with a single devastating blow from the air at the heart of Germany. Even after eight months of war, the powers and limitations of bomber forces remained an enigma to the ‘father of the RAF’, to most of the British public and to their politicians.
On 10 May 1940 the German invasion of France and the Low Countries swept away the Phoney War. The overture was ended. The realities of air power were about to reveal themselves.
2 » 82 SQUADRON
NORFOLK, 1940–41
With broken wing they limped across the sky,
Caught in late sunlight with their gunner dead,
One engine gone – the type was out of date –
Blood on the fuselage turning brown from red . . .
So two men waited, saw the third dead face,
And wondered when the wind would let them die.
– John Bayliss, ‘Reported Missing’
Strolling out on to the tarmac at Watton and scanning the sky early on the morning of 17 May 1940, Wing-Commander the Earl of Bandon was beginning to wonder where his squadron had got to. At 4.50 am, twelve Blenheims of 82 Squadron had taken off for Gembloux in central Belgium to attack a German armoured column. On this clear, beautiful summer’s day, they should have been home for breakfast.
The Battle of France was already a week old, but so far 82 Squadron had escaped astonishingly lightly. In the desperate flurry of anti-shipping strikes that were ordered throughout April to impede the German invasion of Norway, they had sunk nothing but lost only one aircraft. The Blenheims were not called upon to take part in the airfield attacks by 3 and 5 Groups which cost Bomber Command most of the thirty-one aircraft lost over Scandinavia, and which achieved so little even after the Air Ministry
withdrew its initial decree ordering RAF aircraft to attack only with machine-guns rather than bombs, to protect innocent bystanders. Since the German onslaught in the west began on 10 May, 82 Squadron had operated only once, against the Maastricht bridges on 12 May, where they saw for the first time the incredible power of German light flak, but somehow came home to tell the tale. They missed the terrible battle of 14 May, when Barratt’s Advanced Air Striking Force lost forty out of seventy-one Battles, attempting to break the German bridgehead at Sedan. The same evening, Wing-Commander Basil Embry lost seven of the twenty-eight 2 Group Blenheims he led in the desperate effort to stem the tide with support from England.
On 17 May, Paddy Bandon was not himself leading 82 Squadron because his navigator was away in London being interviewed for a commission. In any event, although Bandon often flew, he was modest enough usually to let one of his experienced flight commanders lead the formation, for he was conscious of his own imperfections as a Blenheim pilot. He had spent the year before the war at the Air Staff College, hearing ‘Ugly’ Barratt lecture on the ‘great fist’ of air power, Ludlow-Hewitt argue the superiority of the offensive over the defensive, Group-Captain Robert Saundby declaring the importance of economy of force, of not ‘wasting’ fighters as bomber escorts. Even in 1938 the students learnt nothing of radar, although there was much discussion of such theories as the invincibility of the Lysander Army Co-Operation aircraft, which was thought to be too slow for modern fighters to engage – a year later the surviving Lysander pilots would cast convincing doubts on the validity of this concept. After Staff College, Bandon was posted to the Air Ministry, and at the outbreak of war hoped for command of a fighter squadron. But at thirty-six he was too old. Instead, although he had never dropped a bomb or flown a Blenheim in his life, in the predictable manner of service bureaucracies Bandon was sent to take over 82 Squadron, one of 2 Group’s seven Blenheim units, stationed at Watton in Norfolk, only a few miles from 37 Squadron’s Wellingtons at Feltwell.
Like most other pre-war squadrons, 82 was a family in arms, a group of men scarcely changed since 1937. Like most of his service colleagues, they fell in love with Paddy at first sight. There was something rather stylish about having an earl, even an Irish one, as Squadron CO. When he had the charm of Paddy Bandon, the effect was irresistible. He was a mischievous extrovert with a boundless talent for enjoying life, in the front line of every party, finest shot at the squadron partridge shoots with which they passed the winter of 1939–40, chain-smoking compulsively, racing round the airfield in a little black Morgan two-seater with his uncontrollable spaniel Fluff and his flamboyant black moustache, to the impotent fury of Vincent, the station commander, who had already reprimanded Bandon for scruffiness. The week before Gembloux, an 82 Squadron pilot named Charlie Breese forgot to put down the wheels of his Blenheim before landing, and was at once put under open arrest by the enraged station commander for needlessly wrecking an aircraft. He was confined to his quarters with another disgraced pilot, ‘Atty’ Atkinson, and allowed out only to fly operations. At last the two were summoned to appear before the group commander. Paddy Bandon drove them to headquarters in Huntingdon himself, and stood behind the AOC while that dignitary delivered a fierce reprimand, making faces at the hapless Atkinson and Breese in the hope of reducing them to hysterics. Paddy Bandon’s popularity was instantly understandable – but it was a matter for general astonishment that he eventually retired from the RAF as an air chief marshal.
At 8.20 am that 17 May, the handful of aircrew who were not flying and the ground crews waiting for the return of their charges wandered out into the sunlight when they heard a distant aircraft on the circuit. As the Blenheim approached, they could detect the erratic beat of its single remaining engine. A red Very light lanced into the sky from the cockpit. The ambulance and fire tenders bumped hastily across the grass towards the runway. The aircraft wobbled down, bounced, then coasted along the ground until the propeller abruptly stopped. The pilot, Sergeant Morrison, climbed
stiffly down from the hatch with his observer and gunner. They sank down on the grass.
‘Where’s everybody else, Morrison?’ asked Paddy Bandon.
Shortly before lunch, three crews who had been on another mission that morning arrived over Watton, puzzled by the curious emptiness of the field beneath them. The pilots – Atkinson, Breese and Hunt – had been guiding three fighter squadrons to France (with written orders that ‘There is to be no fighting on the way’, but no proposals about what to do if the Luftwaffe thought otherwise). Now, returning from Lille with their Blenheims loaded with looted champagne, they landed to be ordered to report at once to the CO’s office. There was a groan at the prospect of trouble from Shoreham Customs about their cargo. They walked into Paddy Bandon’s office to find him sitting at his desk, the sparkle of his eyes for once quite dead. ‘Well, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’re now 82 Squadron. Yes, just us.’ The formation of Blenheims had missed their rendezvous with a hastily organized fighter escort, and pressed on alone. They were opened up to face the flak approaching Gembloux when they were attacked by fifteen Me109s from the vast air umbrella covering the German advance. Sergeant Morrison was the only pilot to bring his aircraft home. Before lunch that day orders came from Group to disband the squadron. It was only after a fierce struggle by Paddy Bandon that the order was rescinded, and they began to rebuild the wreckage of 82.
In the days that followed, as the German armies swept across France, and Britain entered her season of unbroken disaster, half-trained crews were sent to them from the Operational Training Units with 200 or 300 hours’ flying experience against the 600 that would become a minimum later in the war. Atkinson began to teach them the rudiments of formation flying. A few survivors of Gembloux trickled back from France, among them Miles Delap, who had distinguished himself in March by sinking Bomber Command’s first U-boat. Paddy Bandon was touched when his
own navigator and two others returned from London with the promise of their commissions, but at once offered to forgo officer training to stay at Watton and keep 82 Squadron alive. An Irish gunner who had gone to the glasshouse for desertion was released at the end of his sentence and asked to be allowed to return to flying duties. He too came back, to be killed like so many others in the weeks that followed.
The so-called heavy aircraft with which the RAF entered the war – the Hampden, Whitley and Wellington – were adequate night-bombers of their generation, chiefly deficient in navigation equipment and crew comfort. But the ‘mediums’ – the Battle and the Blenheim – were suicidally ill-fitted for their role as daylight tactical bombers. Cruising at 180 mph, the Blenheim was almost 200 mph slower than the fighters which it must inevitably encounter. Armed with a single .303 in its rear turret, a fixed rearward-firing gun in the port engine nacelle designed solely as a ‘frightener’ and a clumsy rear-firing gun under the cockpit, it was quite incapable of surviving an efficient fighter attack. Lightly built, it could stand little punishment. It packed a negligible 1,000-lb punch in its bomb bay, and could achieve less than half the rate of climb of a German fighter. Under attack, a Blenheim’s only chance of survival was to find cloud or to attempt a hedge-level escape. Quite unknown to the survivors of 82 Squadron and the bewildered young trainees who arrived at Watton to fill the vacuum after Gembloux, Portal as C-in-C of Bomber Command had been fighting a losing battle with the Air Ministry, since the day before the German invasion of the west began, about the employment of the Blenheims.
I am convinced [he wrote on 8 May] that the proposed use of these units is fundamentally unsound, and that if it is persisted in, it is likely to have disastrous consequences on the future of the war in the air . . . It can scarcely be disputed that at the enemy’s chosen moment for advance the area concerned will be literally swarming with enemy fighters, and we shall be lucky if we see again as many as half the aircraft we send out each time. Really accurate bombing under the conditions I visualize is not to be expected, and I feel justified in expressing serious doubts whether the attacks of 50 Blenheims based on information necessarily some hours out of date are likely to make as much difference to the ultimate course of the war as to justify the losses I expect.
The Air Staff could not rationally dispute Portal’s judgement. But even after the Wilhelmshaven raids, it was unthinkable to admit that the RAF possessed no bomber capable of operating in daylight with acceptable losses. For the remainder of the Battle of France, Portal ceased to have any effective voice as C-in-C of Bomber Command. He became merely a fireman, struggling to meet the minute-by-minute demands of the British Government and the Air Ministry. It had long ago been decided that the RAF should seek to support the army by attacking German communications rather than forward positions. Whether or not this policy made any sense from the outset, within days of 9 May most of Barratt’s Battles, which were intended to execute it, had been wiped out by the brilliantly deployed Luftwaffe screen of flak and fighters covering every potential target. The Air Ministry sought as far as possible to reserve the night bombers for operations against German installations and communications far behind the lines. In reality, it was unimportant what targets were chosen, since it rapidly became clear that Bomber Command was incapable of hitting any pinpoint accurately in the hours of darkness, and was unable to break through the defences in daylight.
Only 2 Group’s Blenheims, however tragically inadequate, could be risked on daylight ground-support operations in the face of the Luftwaffe. No ground-to-air communications existed to make their strikes effective. Efforts to provide them with fighter support were only spasmodically successful. But they were all that the RAF had. 82 Squadron were much bewildered at morning parade on 21 May. Beside their ordered ranks, a handful of scarecrows fell
in, dressed in fragments of uniforms, bandages, tin helmets. These were the survivors of 18 Squadron, newly evacuated from France. Their commanding officer requested that his three remaining aircraft should be attached to 82 for operations that day. They flew with fighter escort to attack a reported Panzer division laagered in a French wood. Instead they found a British Red Cross column. Somehow they came home intact, but for one 18 Squadron Blenheim, whose unusual camouflage markings were mistaken by a nervous Hurricane pilot for those of a Ju88. It was shot down without survivors. On the 22nd, Atkinson led them against German armour at Samar near Boulogne, losing one aircraft. There was then another momentary lull after a determined intervention by Portal, who pointed out that operations in France were ‘draining away the Blenheim crews at the rate of between one and two squadrons per week . . . It is the height of unwisdom to throw the Blenheims away in an attempt to do the work of artillery . . .’