Bomber Command (53 page)
It was the beginning of a summer of intense effort by Bomber Command, vastly different in kind and scale from everything that had gone before. In June 1944, it carried out 15,963 sorties against
the 4,997 of June 1943. Huge forces of aircraft no longer attacked a single target in a concentrated stream. The new objectives required great accuracy from limited forces dispersed across France. To obscure the Allies’ intentions in Normandy, it was necessary to attack marshalling yards, airfields, radar and wireless installations with equal intensity, from Belgium to the Cherbourg peninsula. There were still failures caused by weather and bad luck: on 19 May the Master Bomber cancelled the attack on Amiens as they circled the target, for lack of visibility. Three nights later, 97 Squadron went to Brunswick, a confused and unsatisfactory attack in which Cliff Chatten’s aircraft was badly damaged by a night-fighter while coned over the target, and he somehow brought it home without instruments or cockpit canopy, circling the Wash until there was light enough for a crash landing. He was awarded the DSO and ceased to be a teetotaller.
On 31 May they went to a gun battery at Maisy near Cherbourg, but once again were sent home when they found the target shrouded in cloud. On 3 June they hit a wireless station at Ferme D’Urville. On the evening of 5 June they were briefed to attack a gun battery on the French coast at St Pierre du Mont. They were told nothing of the special significance of the occasion, but their orders were unusual: no aircraft was to fly below 6,500 feet; no bombs were to be jettisoned in the Channel; no IFF was to be used. In the early hours of 6 June, they flew south across the Channel, and broke cloud to see the great invasion armada below them. ‘The army had pulled its finger out at last, and D-Day was on,’ wrote Owen. ‘We bombed at 0500 hrs just as it was getting light, and had a grandstand view of the Americans running in on the beach.’ 3,467 heavy and 1,645 medium and light bombers flew in support of the landings that day. Bomber Command’s Operation
Flashlamp
committed a hundred aircraft to each of ten major German coastal batteries. Some of the attacks were hampered by poor visibility and the guns went into action, but in many cases the German crews were paralysed by the bombing for long enough to enable the Allied forces to overrun them.
As 97 Squadron turned for home, its crews saw the huge formations of American aircraft following them into attack. There was a holiday excitement about the fantastic spectacle below, and perhaps this contributed to a moment of tragedy when German fighters made one of their few effective interventions of the day. Jimmy Carter, 97’s CO, went down hit by a Ju88, taking with him the squadron gunnery and signals leaders. Another aircraft from 97 followed. Yet even the losses could not suppress their satisfaction at taking part in one of the great operations of the war. They turned on the mess radio as they landed at Coningsby, and hung fascinated around it all day.
On 13 June the Germans launched the first of the 30,000 V-Weapons with which they bombarded Britain before the end of the war. For the rest of the summer, Bomber Command and the USAAF added the ‘ski-sites’ and V-Weapons storage depots to the target list of barracks, airfields and marshalling yards that they were already attacking daily. American experiments had indicated that low-level fighter-bomber strikes were the most effective weapon against the ‘ski-sites’, but in its desperate anxiety to save the British people from another Blitz, the Government insisted that the ‘heavies’ should also be thrown into the counter-attack. Senior airmen reminded the War Cabinet that even at maximum intensity, the V-Weapons – ‘those damn silly rockets’, as Harris called them – could do less damage than a single Bomber Command attack on a German city. But this was no consolation to the Prime Minister. Like many aircrew, he regarded the V-Weapons as uniquely cowardly, launched by men who did not risk their own lives in the killing of others. In his anger, he seriously considered reprisal gas attacks against Germany, and several Bomber Command squadrons were specially trained to carry them out. But Eisenhower and Tedder were foremost among those who dissuaded Churchill. The V-Weapons continued to cause much pain and fear, although very limited material damage to Britain. Bomber Command continued to divert aircraft to the ineffectual counter-offensive against them, despite Harris’s bitter opposition.
On 24 June, amidst one of 97’s strikes against a ‘ski-site’ at Prouville, they met the German fighters in force. Tony Aveline suddenly felt the stink of his bomb-aimer’s vomit surge up from the nose, as their pilot hurled the Lancaster into a corkscrew under attack. The squadron lost one aircraft. In the three summer months of June, July and August, barely one-sixth of Bomber Command’s effort was directed against German targets, compared with more than a third of the USAAF’s tonnage. Spaatz had been more successful than Harris in convincing Eisenhower that his operations against Germany would yield early dividends to the Allied armies. Harris, on the other hand, was playing his usual forceful hand in fighting off unwelcome proposals. To the C-in-C of Bomber Command, the German oil plants were merely the latest in the long line of ‘panacea targets’ with which so many knaves and fools sought to divert him from the task of destroying Germany. His fierce opposition to the pre-
Overlord
deployment of Bomber Command forgotten, he also expected greater public recognition of the achievements of the Transport Plan. He wrote to Portal on 1 July:
I think you should be aware of the full depth of feeling that is being aroused by the lack of adequate or even reasonable credit to the RAF in particular and the air forces as a whole, for their efforts in the invasion. I have no personal ambition that has not years ago been satisfied in full, but I for one cannot forbear a most emphatic protest against the grave injustice which is being done to my crews – there are over 10,500 aircrew in my operational squadrons. In three months we have lost over half that number. They have a right that their story should be adequately told, and it is a military necessity that it should be.
Your Ever,
Bert
The Air Ministry asked what resources Harris would now need to destroy ten selected oil targets in the Ruhr. On 13 June, he replied that his staff estimated that 32,000 tons of bombs would be
required – scarcely less than Bomber Command had dropped on all operations in the entire month of May.
Yet as a sop to the ‘panacea merchants’, of whom there seemed to be disagreeably many on the matter of oil, Harris verbally agreed with Tedder that Bomber Command would divert its spare effort to oil targets through the summer. On the night of 21 June, 97 Squadron was part of the force that went to the oil plants at Gelsenkirchen, their only operation against Germany between June and late August. There was a marked lack of enthusiasm among the crews for their return to the Ruhr. They bombed amidst heavy flak and thick overcast, and on the way home met the night-fighters as the moon rose. ‘Not at all a nice trip, and a lot of chaps missing,’ wrote Charles Owen. One of 97’s aircraft failed to return, and two more were badly damaged. That month, Bomber Command launched four major attacks on German oil plants, 832 sorties in all, and paid heavily – extraordinarily so compared with casualties against the French targets. Ninety-three aircraft were missing.
Then the word came down that daylight sorties, abandoned by Bomber Command in mid-1943, were to be resumed. Training was to begin immediately. Formation-flying is a difficult art, and one which it had taken the Americans years to perfect. The British in 1944 had neither the stable, heavily armed and armoured aircraft, nor the highly trained crews to compete with the USAAF over Germany. But as the Allies approached absolute daylight air superiority over France, there was obviously a strong case for Bomber Command to take advantage of the situation, especially after Lille and Mailly-Le-Camp.
On the morning of 23 June, 97 Squadron’s aircrew were in a boisterous mood as they waited for the trucks to take them to the dispersals for a formation training flight. They suddenly fell on a tiny Fiat car owned by a pilot named Perkins, and by force of fifty pairs of arms hauled it to the top of a big air-raid shelter. It was still perched there, and they were still laughing, when they took off. High over Lincolnshire they took up their unaccustomed
positions in formation. Then Van Raalte momentarily allowed his Lancaster to drift into the slipstream of Bill Gee’s aircraft in front. The huge bomber was tossed fiercely aside, plunging into that of Perkins beside it. The two aircraft fell steeply out of the sky, breaking up as they went. The rest of the squadron landed and walked to the air-raid shelter to lift down the little Fiat, much sobered young men. The remains of only eleven bodies were found, but they filled twelve coffins for the funerals. The twelfth turned up in a field weeks later. The thirteenth man, a wireless operator, miraculously survived. A few weeks later another crew took him into the air for a training flight. He landed shaking, and never flew again. In the first weeks after D-Day, the casualties of Bomber Command were higher than those of the British Second Army in Normandy. The scent of victory had gone out of the air again.
On 25 June the new CO arrived. Wing-Commander Anthony Heward had been commanding 50 Squadron when he was summoned to see Cochrane: ‘I want you to take over at 97 and train them to concentrate on the task of target illumination,’ said the AOC. He made no secret of his opinion that the squadron did not conform to the standards of discipline and efficiency that he was looking for. The taste of 8 Group was still too strong at Coningsby for Cochrane’s liking. By the same token, 97 Squadron at once sensed that Heward had been sent to shape them to the 5 Group mould, and resented him accordingly. They also resisted the feeling that here was a career RAF officer, sent to impose meaningless service routines upon experienced operational aircrew. A sharp, clever, rather chilly man, who flew brilliantly when he chose to go into the air, his initial impact on Coningsby was dramatic. He sacked the squadron adjutant within hours of his arrival, and summoned the flight commanders for an icy lecture on untidiness, indiscipline and inefficiency: ‘Nobody was bothering about the length of their hair. They dressed like Desert Rats, in their own idea of uniform.’ Some of his officers were angry and resentful, and indeed Heward won little of their affection. He had more success in moulding novices to his ways than converting the ‘Old
Lags’ from 8 Group. But he quickly became aware that 97 Squadron’s aircrew were markedly superior to the general run of Bomber Command in ability and qualifications.
For no apparent reason, there were a surprising number of officers of private means and comfortable background among them: Charles Owen; Heward himself; Arthur Ingham, the tall, balding son of a northern wool-merchant’s family who was older than most and said little about his experiences, but was respected as a superb operational captain. Lionel Wheble and Gordon Cooper, the H2S leader, were both members of Lloyd’s, the London underwriters. Jock Simpson had been chief accountant of the Bank of Scotland. Most exotic of all was Pete de Wesselow, a surgeon’s son of White Russian origins who had transferred to the RAF from the Brigade of Guards. The precise, immaculate de Wesselow spoke several languages fluently, collected antique glass, and could call on a rower’s physique for throwing his Lancaster around the sky.
These men of unusually elegant background for Bomber Command were leavened by the host of Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Norwegians, South Africans and Englishmen who made every squadron such a melting-pot of youth and experience: Noel Parker, an Australian who had already been shot down over France and walked home to return to operations; ‘Killer’ Booth, the primeval little rear gunner who had somehow survived over a hundred operations with ruthless relish, and had an axe dripping blood painted on the wall of his billet; Pat Broome, the bombing leader, who decorated the mess with his cartoons, and who never seemed to be without his dog Virginia and the WAAF of the moment; Steve and Dave – Bowman and Crugeon – two inseparable Australians who were finally killed on the same night in different aircraft; Bill Clayfield, the debonair signals leader who raced his Singer to the Gliderdrome dancehall in Boston so many nights of Stand-Down; Watson, with the spaniel that he always took on operations, and which finally fell from the night sky over Germany beside him; Perkins’s two wild Canadian gunners, who were sent to Sheffield in punishment for smashing the sergeants’ mess one
night and thus missed the crash that killed their pilot. These and 170 or so other aircrew made up 97 Squadron in 1944.
Coningsby was one of the crack stations of 5 Group, the hub of ‘54 Base’. Bomber Command had sub-divided its Groups into base commands, each centred on a station with several ‘satellite’ airfields. 97 shared Coningsby with 83 Squadron. The two units worked in close partnership, indeed were usually briefed together by the little base commander, Air Commodore Bobby Sharpe. There was also a tiny, elite force at Coningsby known as 54 Base Flight, which comprised 5 Group’s Master Bombers. A hut on the station housed the Jordan Trainer, a highly sophisticated device for training Master Bombers. Pupils sat in their ‘cockpit’ in a gallery, while below them a fifteen-foot darkened model of a German city revolved to create its image as seen from a circling aircraft, with steam producing cloud, lights and small pyrotechnics imitating Target Indicators and smoke. To be a Master Bomber was intensely dangerous, circling the target throughout an attack, often descending to very low level to correct markers that had fallen wide. Visually-marked attacks depended heavily on the Master Bomber, and when he was shot down or suffered technical failure, the whole raid often ended in fiasco.
97 Squadron still carried out marking and bombing attacks according to well-established 8 Group techniques. But their most notable contribution to 5 Group’s operations was as an Illuminating Force, lighting up the target for the Mosquitoes who followed them. Routines varied in detail from operation to operation, but a classic 5 Group raid in the late summer of 1944 sent selected aircraft of 83 and 97 Squadrons to open the attack by laying lines of parachute flares over the target blind by H2S, at seven-second intervals, with a margin of error seldom much above 200 yards. Meanwhile the Primary Blind Marker dropped his Target Indicators, also by H2S, to give the Mosquitoes an approximate line on the target. 627’s Mosquitoes then came in low with their Target Indicators or Red Spot Fires – more precise but less brilliant markers. The first pilot to see the marking-point called ‘Tally-Ho!’
on the radio-telephone, and dived in to mark. It was then the Master Bomber’s business to assess its accuracy and call for correction and support as required, before letting loose the Main Force. Supporting illuminators were available to reinforce the flares as necessary, but often went home without being required to act. In both 5 and 8 Groups, there was a distinct hierarchy of importance and efficiency among marking crews, who were promoted to ‘Flare Force I’, or demoted to become ‘Supporters’ according to their operational performance.