Bomber Command (11 page)
But the supreme crisis of Dunkirk swept away all reservations. 2 Group were once again flung into the battle. The great pall of black smoke hanging a thousand feet high over the beaches made it almost impossible to pinpoint German batteries accurately before attack, but gave the Blenheims vital cover when they dived away from the pursuing Messerschmitts. Again and again, they flew home clinging to the waves, holed from nose to tail, desperately seeking to sidestep the German fighters. Basil Embry, who would escape to become a legendary 2 Group commander later in the war, was among scores of Blenheim pilots shot down at this period. 6 June was a bleak day for 82 Squadron, when they came home with an aircraft missing and most of the others holed, a gunner draped dead in his turret. The crane that drew up alongside the wreck at Watton to winch the corpse out of his position was one of their grimmest memories of that summer. Honry and Mackenzie were killed on 8 June. On 13 June they went to strafe a tank laager at Le Gault. They had just opened bomb doors when the Me109s fell on them. Within minutes they lost Breese, Williams and Merritt. They were all carrying the standard bombload
of two 250-lb, nine 40-lb and a can of incendiaries. One of Breese’s 40-lb bombs was still hung up when his aircraft crashed, and exploded on impact.
A few days later a new crew crashed on take-off, and an Me109 poured fire into Atkinson’s Blenheim as he bombed. His observer threw himself to the floor to bring the ventral gun to bear, meeting a burst that ripped through the aircraft and himself, lifting the man bodily into the air. French flak hit them in the bomb bay as they hedgehopped home, flying low so that the great columns of refugees could see the RAF roundels and escape being obliged to dive into the ditches. Somehow they got home to Watton.
There were days when they flew in formations drawn from the whole of 2 Group. ‘Mac’ McFarlane joined the RAF as a Direct Entry Observer in 1938, and now at twenty was the most experienced on 82 Squadron. Three of his pre-war training course survived the war. One morning his Blenheim was in the midst of a long train of thirty-six aircraft, in vics at 8,000 feet, attacking an airfield near Béthune. To his astonishment and dismay, the formation leader took them over the airfield once without bombing, and began a long, slow turn for a second run over the target. The Me109s and 110s were already scrambling. Wellings, McFarlane’s pilot, went into a vertical dive as an Mel10 flashed by so close that they saw the crew’s white faces staring up at them. McFarlane was struck by the fire axe at the stern of the aircraft breaking loose and falling upon him. The compass dial cracked and the air speed indicator reached a mad, screaming 350 mph. A line of holes stitched across the port wing, and there was a sudden explosion as black smoke poured from the engine. The pilot struggled to force back the yoke with McFarlane’s assistance. They pulled out of the dive over a wood. In a series of jolting concussions, they lost the ventral gun nacelle, the bomb doors, the trailing aerial and the tailwheel in the tree tops. But the fire was out and the Messerschmitt had vanished. They went home across the fields, sending an old Frenchman diving from his tractor into the corn as they roared over him, then over the coast and skimming the waves of the Channel. Their
hydraulics were gone, and over Watton they fired a red Very light. On their second attempt, they made a successful belly landing and walked away from the wreckage.
The German bombing of Rotterdam, although it killed a thousand Dutch civilians rather than the 30,000 reported across the world at the time, seemed a convincing justification for the Royal Air Force to lift some of its restrictions on bombing military targets inside Germany. On 15 May Portal was authorized to attack rail and oil installations east of the Rhine. As the summer of 1940 melted into autumn, Bomber Command’s attentions were divided between German airfields in France and the Low Countries, the gathering concentration of invasion barges in the coastal ports, and the oil installations which Portal had become convinced were the key to striking at the German war machine. While 3, 4 and 5 Groups flew night after night over Germany accomplishing little but also losing very few aircraft, 82 Squadron, like the rest of 2 Group, was now called upon to fight by day and by night.
The results of their efforts were predictably indecisive. ‘Object of strike: Attack 1(a) (ii) 28a Mannheim Rhenonia Oil Works’, reads a characteristic photographic intelligence report of the period, for an attack on 25 June 1940. ‘Photograph does not appear to show all the target, but no evidence of damage is visible.’ Their losses were also predictably crushing. Under the terms of their new orders, they were not required to press on with a daylight attack unless there was adequate cloud cover en route, but it was left to each pilot to make his own decision, and more and more often they flew on missions independently rather than in formation. On 2 July twelve 82 Squadron aircraft took off. Ten turned back for lack of cloud cover, but of the two which went on, one was lost. The figures were the same for 7 July and 11 July. Three aircraft had thus been lost for six sorties completed. On the 13th, nine Blenheims took off and two more were lost. On the 18th, only two aircraft attacked of the twelve which took off.
On 29 July, Bill Keighley was the pilot of one of four aircraft which were sent in daylight to attack oil refineries at Hamburg. A psychologist had just come down to study 82 Squadron’s morale, and reported that he was astonished to find it so buoyant. If he had talked to Flight-lieutenant Keighley, the young officer would have told him that he did not expect to last the course. At that time, indeed, nobody on 82 seemed to know when a tour of operations was supposed to finish, because no one had ever completed one. Keighley had arrived at the squadron on 20 June and had since noticed that the crews who fared best were those who allowed themselves to think least. On this, his ninth and last operation with Bomber Command, he set course conscious of all sorts of ill omens, because he had taken off through a covey of Norfolk’s ubiquitous partridges, downing them all. A man who disliked killing things, he felt that they were in for a bad day.
He had been an engineer in his father’s business in Darlington until 1936, when on his third application he was accepted for a short-service commission. He operated the RAF’s full range of obsolete medium bombers before the war, the Fairey Gordon, the Wellesley, the Battle and finally the Blenheim, but he reached 82 with very little experience of flying with a full bombload. Like other pilots, he had developed a healthy respect for the Blenheim’s alarming accident rate. Banking before adequate airspeed had been obtained on take-off killed scores of novices. There had always been a deep-seated RAF belief that an uncomfortable pilot – indeed preferably a pilot in an open cockpit – remained a wide-awake pilot. There was no danger of falling asleep in a Blenheim, with a generator too weak to support a proper heating system, and crews in winter reduced to flying encased in water-filled ‘Ever-Hot’ bags to escape freezing. The Blenheim’s windscreen was of unstressed glass that could and did shatter under the impact of a passing pigeon. It was not an aircraft to give confidence to the inexperienced.
After flying eastwards across the North Sea, Keighley turned south on the dogleg approach to Hamburg. The clouds had evaporated and the sky ahead was completely clear. Only one of his
colleagues risked an attack on 29 July, closing in to bomb, missing the target, then narrowly escaping the pursuing gaggle of Messerschmitts. Keighley decided instead to divert to their secondary target, Leuwarden airfield in northern Holland. They attacked from 2,000 feet and had turned across the coast for home when the gunner reported two Me110s closing fast. Pulling the 9-lb boost lever that gave the engines a burst of extra power at the cost of very rapid fuel consumption, Keighley drove the Blenheim at its 265 mph maximum speed towards a friendly island of cloud. It was quickly clear that he would lose the race. Still minutes short of safety, the first bursts of fire began to clatter through the fuselage, and as Keighley pushed the aircraft into a steep dive for the sea, he heard the gunner’s agonized cry: ‘I’m hit! I can’t see!’ The turret never fired and there was sudden silence on the intercom. The German fighters swung in again. Keighley felt as if he was in a corrugated iron shed with someone bouncing dried peas on the roof. Cannon fire rippled into the fuselage. The windscreen shattered, the engine nacelles were riddled.
Then suddenly they were in cloud, and oblivious of the splinters in his leg and back Keighley muttered exultantly: ‘We’ve made it!’ In the crowded five minutes of the action, the observer, apparently paralysed, hung over the ventral gun without firing a shot. The aircraft broke from the cloud bank to find itself alone in the peaceful sky, and for a moment Keighley sank back, exhausted with relief. Then the propeller sheared from the port engine and spun glittering away towards the sea. The oil pressure on the starboard engine began to drop rapidly as oil poured from a fractured line. ‘There’s no future in this,’ thought Keighley, and swung resignedly back towards the German coast. He saw the Texel ahead, and threw out his maps and the radio frequency list while they were still losing height over the sea. They crashlanded in a cornfield, where they found the gunner dead. Keighley and his observer were taken away in a German ambulance, having been inspected by the very cocky young Luftwaffe Me110 pilot who had brought them down. Keighley spent six weeks in hospi
tal before being transferred to wait out the next five years in a prison camp.
In the autumn of 1940, as the threat of invasion hung over England, 82 Squadron’s aircrew were pushed through a punishing, unyielding cycle of operations against barges and oil installations interspersed with long, dreary Invasion Stand-By duties. The Blenheims were moved to the satellite airfield of Bodney, leaving 21 Squadron in sole possession of Watton, and the crews now lived in a nearby mansion requisitioned by the RAF, Claremont Hall. The house had been taken over complete with furniture and fittings, and the young men revelled in the unaccustomed elegance, whenever they were allowed to enjoy it. Every night the stand-by crews had to sleep in their aircraft, with one officer dossing down alone in the woodman’s cottage by the flarepath that served as a Flight Office. They carried revolvers on the ground and in the air.
When they were stood down for a few hours, they hired a coach to go to a dance hall, or made for The George in Fakenham or the Samson and Hercules in Norwich, 2 Group’s unofficial headquarters. Meeting crews from other squadrons was a grim business: ‘How’s old so-and-so?’ ‘Oh, didn’t you know? He bought it on Thursday . . .’ Girls were passed from dead pilots to their successors with the fatalism that became part of the harsh legend of Bomber Command. They always seemed to know the targets, and at this time when Fifth Column mania was rife, more than one pilot began to study the blonde beside him at the bar with the most extravagant suspicions.
Bodney itself was alive with game, and the autumn days were soon peppered with reckless gunfire as pilots and ground crews emptied pistols and rifles at hares, rabbits, partridges and pheasants, frequently narrowly missing the Church Army canteen van parked beside the trees that lined the field. The airmen commuted to and fro between Watton and Claremont Hall on trucks that often went home with the spoils of sport hung ready skinned or
plucked over the tailgate. Even after Gembloux, even after the deadly stream of losses throughout the summer, ‘Mac’ McFarlane was surprised how he and many of the others could still treat everything that happened to them as a great lark, glorified ‘cops and robbers’: ‘To us kids, it was all a marvellous game at first.’
But the squadron’s spirits slipped when Paddy Bandon vanished to 2 Group headquarters staff, and in his place came a chilly, ruthless officer who feared nothing himself and had no sympathy for others who obviously did. The new CO was given to cutting remarks about his pilots in the mess, muttering as he watched through the window a Blenheim taking off for an operation: ‘Well, I suppose
he’ll
find some excuse to creep back before he’s halfway across the Channel.’ One day the CO returned from a strike with the underside of his Blenheim scarred with shrapnel from the explosion of his own bombs beneath him. He called out all the crews to gaze at it: ‘
That
is the way I expect crews to bomb, and
that
is the height at which I expect them to attack!’ he announced furiously. The squadron shrugged its shoulders. Even when crews were being lost faster then they could unpack, they did not shrink from doing the job. But they shared no enthusiasm for a man who was obviously indifferent to his own survival. When he went missing soon afterwards, he was unregretted.
In his place came ‘Black Mac’ – Wing Commander John Macdonald – sent down from 4 Group to pull the squadron together, no mean task when it was being decimated weekly, when some crews went so rapidly that the Squadron Office did not bother to enter their names in the operational record book. They were not so much demoralized as brutally fatalistic. ‘Where are my quarters, please?’ asked a big, red-headed former Church of England parson who arrived in the sergeants’ mess one afternoon having put aside his dog collar to become an air gunner. ‘I wouldn’t worry if I was you,’ said Bill Magrath blithely, a hardened young veteran of twenty. ‘You won’t be here a week.’
The planning of operations was a cottage industry. McFarlane, first into the Briefing Room one evening, was summoned to the
big map by Vincent, the station commander. He pointed to the flags stuck at intervals across northern Europe: ‘Well, you’re first. Take your pick.’ McFarlane settled for a German aerodrome. In the event, they found it empty, and on their own initiative searched for something better. They unloaded their bombs on a steelworks close to the Dutch border, took a photograph, and came home to show it to the Intelligence Officer. He was horrified: ‘Good God, you might have killed women and children.’ With the perverse irony of the times, they were taken off operations for three days in punishment.