Bomber Command (27 page)

Bomber Command had begun to establish the emphasis on concentration that was to dominate the offensive – aircraft seeking to bomb within the shortest possible space of each other, saturating the German defences and fire-fighting system. Timing over the target had become vital. Routeing across the North Sea to surprise the night-fighters was developing into an art. The days of individual attack ‘by guess and by God’ were ending. But it was still difficult to assess the full potential of
Gee
, because the hundred or so crews who were now equipped with the device were taking time to learn to use it effectively. The navigator operated the set from a receiver mounted to the right of his table behind the pilot. By timing the radio pulses received from three English ground stations whose signals appeared as lines on a cathode ray tube, he could determine the aircraft’s position on charts marked with special
Gee
grids. Accuracy depended heavily on individual proficiency and it was clear from the continuing attacks on the Ruhr that the device was not proving sufficiently precise to become a blind-bombing system.
Gee
was a vast improvement on Dead Reckoning, and added greatly to the confidence of the crews.

At Swinderby that spring, however, enthusiasm for the delights of new navigational aid was qualified by dismay about exchanging their Hampdens for Manchesters. Initially, everybody was excited by the prospect of the new aircraft with its much more sophisticated equipment and seven-man crew – two pilots, navigator,
bomb-aimer, wireless-operator, mid-upper and rear gunners. Then the first reports seeped in of the unreliability and lack of power in the Vulture engines, the poor rate of climb and lack of ceiling. The Manchester could not, in fact, reach the Hampden’s fully-loaded maximum height of 20,000 feet. Tolley Taylor, one of 50’s sergeant pilots, took his new aircraft for a spin and came back to report that it was ‘ideal for going out to lunch’: very comfortable, properly heated at last after the icy Hampden, pleasant to fly. But apart from lack of performance, its weak undercarriage punished heavy landings by instant collapse. Under each engine nacelle ran a Y-shaped coolant pipe that proved lethally vulnerable to local shrapnel bursts. The squadron’s aircraft serviceability rate fell dramatically. But until the new Lancaster reached them later in the year, the Manchester was all that there was. They set themselves to learn how to get the best out of it.

After the usual assortment of ‘Gardening’ operations and desultory raids on the Ruhr and some of the less dangerously defended German cities, towards the end of April they were committed to the second of Harris’s devastating eradication attacks, on the north German coastal town of Rostock. The ingredients were the same as for Lübeck: a lightly defended tinderbox old city. It was a seven-hour round trip, well beyond
Gee
range. The force was divided, part being directed to attack the city itself, others the Heinkel aircraft factory beyond the southern suburbs.

This time the attack was continued over four nights. On the first two, 23 and 24 April, results were disappointing. But the third and fourth raids, by 128 and 107 aircraft respectively, were greeted at High Wycombe as triumphs to match the destruction of Lübeck. The centre of Rostock was left ablaze. 50 Squadron were among the contingent from 3 and 5 Groups briefed to attack the Heinkel works at low level. Oxley assured them at briefing that they were due for another walkover against negligible defences. In reality, the Germans had brought up every flak gun they could muster from the length of north Germany by the third night. The defences were fierce. But when the photographs were analysed the next day,
the crews were informed that they had staged one of the most accurate precision attacks of the war. Goebbels declared almost hysterically: ‘Community life in Rostock is almost at an end.’ The Ministry of Economic Warfare reported: ‘It seems little exaggeration to say that Rostock has for the time being ceased to exist as a going concern.’ Thousands of people had fled in panic from the blazing ruins, public buildings were levelled and the surrounding towns and villages became vast temporary refugee camps.

At 50 Squadron, there was another verse for the intelligence officer’s long epic verse, set to the tune of Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’:

When the sirens moan to awake Cologne

They shiver in their shoes;

In the Berlin street they’re white as sheets

With a tinge of Prussian blues;

In Rostock the Wardens knock and yell ‘Put Out That Light’

When Hampdens from Swinderby go out in the moonlight,

out in the moonlight, out on a moonlight night
.
⁶

‘Thus, by the end of April 1942,’ wrote the official historian, ‘Bomber Command, under the vigorous leadership of Air Marshal Harris, had shown, not only to Britain’s Allies, but also to her enemies the tremendous potential power of the long-range heavy bomber force.’
⁷

But they add immediately, almost in contradiction, that Bomber Command ‘had yet to win a major victory against a major target’. German production in both Lübeck and Rostock returned to normal with astonishing speed. Far from losing the six to seven weeks’ output estimated by the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Lübeck was operating at between 80 and 90 per cent of normal within days, and even the severely damaged Heinkel factory made a miraculous recovery within weeks. If the destruction of the two Hanse towns had been a test of Bomber Command’s technique for firing cities, it had also been a forewarning – albeit unknown in London or High Wycombe – of the extraordinary resistance of
industrial plant to bombardment. Only the medieval hearts of Lübeck and Rostock lay irrevocably dead and still, rotting in their own remains.

But Sir Arthur Harris exploited publicity brilliantly to further his policies. The attacks on Lübeck and Rostock had been blazoned across Britain. Now, in May 1942, Harris conceived a further, extraordinarily imaginative stroke: a force of one thousand British bombers, the greatest concentration of air power in the history of the world, would attack a single German city in a single night.

There was, of course, no military magic about the figure of a thousand aircraft. It was the potential effect on popular imagination, on the politicians and on the Americans and the Russians that fascinated Whitehall. Portal grasped the beauty of ‘The 1,000 Plan’ at once, and gave Harris his full support to muster this enormous force, double the strength of Bomber Command’s front-line squadrons. The Prime Minister, with his great sense of theatre, was won over immediately. Only the Admiralty, in the midst of the Battle of the Atlantic, was exasperated by such gimmicky enterprises as it struggled to fight its convoys through. The First Sea Lord absolutely refused to allow Coastal Command aircraft to be diverted to the operation. Harris was compelled to raise his force almost entirely from his own squadrons at maximum effort, and from his Operational Training Units. It was a remarkable logistical achievement that, on the night of 30 May 1942, 1,046 Bomber Command aircraft took off for Cologne. They had been crowded on to the stations of eastern England, where ground crews worked to bring the OTU aircraft to operational standard and staff brief OTU pupils and instructors. Only at the last moment did the weather determine that Cologne rather than Hamburg was the target. At his headquarters at High Wycombe, Harris had listened to the forecast in silence. Then, with his unerring eye for drama, he gave his orders:

The C-in-C moved at last. Slowly he pulled an American cigarette carton from his pocket, and, flicking the bottom with his thumb, selected the protruding Lucky Strike . . . He continued to stare at the charts and then slowly his forefinger moved across the continent of Europe and came to rest on a town in Germany . . . He turned to the SASO, his face still expressionless:

‘The 1,000 Plan tonight.’

His finger was pressing on Cologne.
⁸

50 Squadron put up seventeen aircraft that night. At briefing, when the CO announced that there would be more than a thousand aircraft over the target, there was a moment of awed silence. They were alarmed by the prospect of collision, but they were told that Bomber Command’s operational research scientists had computed that statistically there should be no more than two aircraft colliding in the target area. Somebody piped up: ‘That’s fine – but do they know which two?’, and the gale of tense laughter passed into the legend of the bomber offensive. Then they walked out into the dusk of a beautiful summer evening, and took off through clear skies for Cologne.

They attacked in three waves, led by the Wellingtons of 3 Group. Almost uniquely, 3 Group’s AOC, Air Vice-Marshal ‘Jackie’ Baldwin, whom we last saw writing the post-mortem report on the Wilhelmshaven raid two and a half years earlier, flew in person as a passenger in one of his own aircraft. Senior officers were generally forbidden to fly on ‘ops’ for common-sense security reasons, although this dangerously increased their isolation from the realities of war over Germany. Behind 3 Group came the Stirlings, and last of all the Manchesters and Lancasters of 5 Group, for in these days the ‘heavies’ were usually left to bring up the rear on the theory that they were best able to withstand punishment over the thoroughly awakened defences. But on the night of 30 May, crews in the later waves crossed northern Germany, skirting the heavy flak around München-Gladbach, unable to accept the reality of the vast red glow in the sky ahead of them. Some crews thought that a great forest or heath must have caught fire, others that the
Germans had created an enormous dummy fire to draw the bombers. Only as they drew near did they perceive the incredible truth, that this was the city of Cologne, ablaze from end to end.

Micky Martin was due over target forty-five minutes after H-Hour. From miles away, he could see the huge fires lighting the sky ahead, dwarfing the pathetic flickers of flak and searchlights. Martin came in low at 4,000 feet, his crew gazing on the glowing red core of the city, broken by the silver thread of the Rhine, the shimmering white spangles of blazing incendiaries, the great silhouette of the cathedral, its twin towers still lingering amidst the miles of rubble around the Rhine bridge. Many of the flak batteries had run out of ammunition, for transport could no longer cross the city from the dumps to the guns. Searchlights were meandering wildly like drunken men. Some pilots felt as if their own aircraft were on fire with the city, as the red glow danced up and down on their wings. Three times Martin swung over Cologne awed, like so many airmen that night, by the devastation below. They had never seen anything remotely like it. Between 0047 and 0225 that morning, 3,330 houses were utterly destroyed, more than 2,000 badly damaged, more than 7,000 partly damaged. 12,000 fires raged among the breached water mains, severed power cables, exploded gas mains and wrecked telephone systems. 36 factories were totally destroyed, 70 more badly damaged, more than 200 partially damaged. The docks and railway system had been savaged. The tram system remained totally out of action for a week and dislocated for months to come. 85 soldiers and members of civil-defence teams had been killed along with 384 civilians. Almost 5,000 people required first aid. 45,000 people had lost their homes.

This was a mere token of the destruction Bomber Command would achieve in 1943 and 1944, and indeed the lasting damage to Cologne proved astonishly slight in relation to the forces employed. But in 1942 it seemed to the airmen that Britain had achieved the power to unleash Armageddon. Micky Martin hesitated before deciding where it was still worth dropping bombs,
and finally let them fall across the battered railway station. The crew chattered excitedly on the intercom. They would see many such urban funeral pyres in the next three years, but no man who was there ever forgot this baptism at Cologne.

Tolley Taylor’s was one of the few aircraft which had the ill luck to be hit that night. Running in to bomb at 12,000 feet, shrapnel struck the starboard engine, setting it on fire. He pressed the feathering button to shut off power, and after a frightening half-minute falling steeply through the sky, the fire went out and he regained control at around 9,000 feet. ‘Stand by to bale out,’ he ordered. The gunners slipped out of their turrets, the hatches plummeted away from the aircraft and a rush of air swept through the fuselage. As they turned out of the target, Taylor peered at his gauges. They were losing height and could cruise at barely 110 mph. But they were still flying. They might make it. He ordered the crew to free every ounce of spare weight. They began to hurl out guns, ammunition, armour plate, the Elsan portable toilet – anything movable whirled away into the slipstream as they staggered painfully across the Channel. After more than six hours in the air they force-landed at Tempsford, the base of the Special Duties squadrons which operated the cloak-and-dagger flights to occupied Europe. Taylor pushed his way into the debriefing room, full of unaccustomed cubicles and unfamiliar blackened faces. ‘Terrific prang! Weren’t the fires great?’ he said eagerly to the pilot beside him. ‘There weren’t any fires where I’ve been,’ said the other young man bleakly. Taylor and his crew flew home to Swinderby the next day in a Whitley, in time for the general celebrations.