The Separation (21 page)

I returned to Northolt. After two days I received my posting back to 148 Squadron at Tealby Moor. A week later I was summoned to the Station Commander’s office and given a sealed envelope which had been delivered by a motorcycle despatch rider. Noticing the insignia on the back flap, I took it to my room and opened it in private. It contained a short, typewritten note:
Dear Squadron Leader J. L. Sawyer,

The Prime Minister is grateful for your diligent attention to the task you undertook on his behalf. He wishes you to know that your report has been studied in detail and is currently being acted upon. You are of course aware of the highly confidential nature of your findings and conclusions, which confidence must not be breached within the foreseeable future for any reason whatsoever.
Yours sincerely,

(signed) Arthur Curtis

Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister

Underneath was another note, this one written with a broad-nibbed fountain pen. It said: Hess will no doubt receive what he deserves, as will in the end Herr Hitler. Yr. report is a great credit to you. I wish to apologize once again for my insensitive remarks concerning yr. late bro., which were based on a misunderstanding within my department. I held him in the highest regard.
WSC

(I never again saw the man who stood in for Rudolf Hess. He remained a prisoner in Britain until the end of the war, with no information about him being released to the public. He frequently feigned amnesia and madness, but always maintained he was Hess. He was taken to Nuremberg in October 1945, where he was indicted under all four Counts as a war criminal. He was found guilty on Counts One and Two Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War and Waging Aggressive War - but not guilty on Counts Three and Four - War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Because of Soviet suspicions about Hess, he was not allowed remission against his sentence. He therefore served forty-two years in prison (forty-six years when the time spent in Britain is included). For the last years of his life he was the sole prisoner in Spandau Prison, West Berlin. He never appealed against his sentence on the grounds of wrongful conviction or mistaken identity. He refused to see Frau Ilse Hess or her son Wolf for many years, finally relenting in 1969 when he mistakenly believed he was near death. At the time he was seventy-five years old. Frau Hess had not seen her husband for more than twenty-eight years. Medical examination of the prisoner in 1973 could find no trace of the scarring that would have been caused by rifle bullet injuries known to have been sustained by Rudolf Hess during the First World War. This is the only forensic evidence made public that supports my own belief about the imposture, because scars caused by bullet wounds never disappear. The prisoner died in mysterious circumstances while he was still being held in Spandau, in August 1987. A suicide note found by the body appeared to have been written many years earlier. Post-mortem examination of the body did not establish conclusive cause of death, other than asphyxiation. In some quarters his death is regarded as murder. Again, no sign of heavy scarring from war injuries was found on the body. Soon after the death of the prisoner, Spandau Prison was demolished to prevent it becoming a shrine for neo-Nazis. The body was laid to rest by the family in a secret location. Some time later, it was moved to the family plot in Wunsiedel. The prisoner’s real identity, if known, was never revealed by the authorities.)

24

After my spell working for Churchill I was posted back to 148 Squadron in September 1941 and in theory resumed operational flights in December. In reality, because of my long absence, I was sent on a flying refresher course to an airfield on the Welsh coast near Aberystwyth. When I returned to Tealby Moor I was assigned a new flight-crew, but almost at once the news came through that 148 Squadron was converting to four-engined heavy bombers.

Once again, the squadron was taken out of the front line and many of the personnel started to disperse to other postings. While I was working with Churchill I heard a report that 148 Squadron had been selected for conversion to the new Lancaster bomber. For that reason I opted to stay on. I was posted to an RAF base in Scotland used by an HCU (Heavy Conversion Unit), where I was introduced to the new plane, first by training on its immediate two-engined predecessor, the Manchester, then by practising on the Halifax, another four-engined plane of slightly older design. I was therefore one of the first RAF

pilots to fly the Lancaster operationally, the plane that over the next few years was to become the backbone of the RAF’s bombing campaign against Germany.

In 1942 the Lancaster represented a radical breakthrough in bomber design. It could fly faster, higher and further than any existing type. It was strong, well defended and carried a much larger and more varied payload of bombs. It was equipped with Rolls-Royce Merlin engines - the same unit that powered the famous Spitfire fighter - and it flew like a dream, laden or empty. After two weeks of familiarization training at the HCU, working with my new crew, we were sent back to Tealby Moor. In due course the squadron started taking deliveries of Lancasters from the factory and by mid-May we were ready to become operational again. My first Lancaster raid was on the German town of Mannheim, but after that ‘blooding’ we were once again taken out of operations. Two weeks later, during which rumours were constantly circulating that the Air Ministry was preparing a

‘spectacular’, I took part in the first so-called thousand-bomber raid on the city of Cologne on May 30, 1942.

These two missions, to Mannheim and Cologne, were in some respects routine affairs: we experienced no technical difficulties with the aircraft, we came under no sustained attack, we dropped our bomb load as close as we could to the target area and we returned home safely. Apart from an extra feeling of nervousness, as it was more than a year since I had flown on a raid, the main practical difference was the fact of flying the Lancaster. However, both the raids had a signal effect on me, if for different reasons. The day after we went to Mannheim we received photographic evidence of our bombing results. As I was a senior operational pilot in the squadron I went to the debriefing session where the photographs were produced. The pictures revealed that the raid had been an almost total failure: most of the bombs we dropped fell in open countryside or forest, some of them many miles from the town. Only a handful of bombs fell where intended and these had started fires in a small industrial area. There was a scattering of bomb or incendiary damage over the rest of the town, all of it minor. At the same time, we already knew that of the two hundred RAF aircraft sent to Mannheim that night, eleven had been shot down. No parachutes were seen.

Each plane carried a crew of five or seven men, depending on the type of aircraft: around seventy young men were dead. By any standards it was a disaster, with unknowable but all too imaginable impact on the families, friends and colleagues of the dead men. Seventy men dead for what?

While the raid on Mannheim was a ‘failure’ in strategic terms, the attack that followed was a ‘success’. It was carried out as a show of Bomber Command’s strength, to demonstrate to the enemy that we possessed the ability to put a thousand bombers into the skies above a German city and bomb it into oblivion.

A thousand planes were in fact sent, although less than half were from front-line operational squadrons. Most of the aircraft were found elsewhere: mostly from OTUs (Operational Training Units) or HCUs. Some of these planes were piloted by instructors, but many others were flown by trainee pilots. The Germans were not to know this, however, and the effect of the raid was devastating, both as propaganda and in terms of damage to the target.

148 Squadron was despatched to Cologne late in the evening, so when we arrived over the city much of the bombing had already been completed. We were at twenty thousand feet, close to the Lancaster’s operating ceiling. We took advantage of this to stay above the general level of activity. As we turned in to start our bombing run the city lay ahead of us, already blazing and smoking, fires spreading out in all directions. Planes below us were silhouetted against the terrible conflagration. Pinpoints of brilliant light, our incendiaries, lay like ten thousand glinting beads on the streets, roofs and gardens below. Flares tumbled down, spitting magnesium light like immense escaped fireworks, illuminating the horrors on the ground. Whole districts were ablaze, as individual fires reached out and joined up with others, the flames dazzling yellows, whites and reds, mottled by the bulging, rising smoke. Explosions continued in every part of the city, shattering the buildings, blasting them open so that the incendiaries might take a better hold.

Anti-aircraft shells exploded around us, shaking us and unnerving us, but we came through unscathed. It seemed to me that the flak was much lighter than I had known it on earlier raids. We were flying higher, we arrived later. Our bomb aimer called up to report that we had released our load. I heard the voices of the rest of the crew speaking in relief. I flew on according to plan, heading south across the city, not daring to swing round and across the path of the planes in the bomber stream. As soon as we were clear of the main inferno I turned the Lancaster through a hundred and eighty degrees and we went back. Now we were flying north, heading for the first navigation marker on our route home, the town of Monchengladbach, near the Dutch border. We passed Cologne on our right, staying well away from the centre of the city, not wanting to attract the flak. More British planes were arriving to drop their bombs.

Even from this distance we could see their bellies shining orange with the light from the fires on the ground. The explosions and flares continued. The fires were much bigger already, spilling across the city like floods of flaming liquid.

I noticed that most of the searchlights were out and the antiaircraft fire from the ground had almost ceased - the last RAF planes were flying in unchallenged to drop their bombs. I looked again at the inferno: who could be down there still, manning the guns, loading and aiming them, firing them off at the sky? Fire and smoke were everywhere. Turmoil had consumed Cologne. The RAF planners called it

‘overwhelming’ a city: it happened when the level of bombing reached saturation point, one bomb following another, wiping out everything, obliterating the searchlights, silencing the guns. I remembered the guns I had seen in London, poking up through the trees of Green Park and Hyde Park, and alongside Horse Guards Parade, their ineffectiveness against even a small force of a hundred planes apparent. We were a raiding force ten times that size. How can any city defend itself against air bombing? After only a few nights of the Blitz, London became a chaotic tangle of broken gas-and water-mains, disrupted electricity supplies, cratered streets, burned-out buildings, fallen rubble, homeless families. Our single raid on Cologne was by several factors larger than anything London had suffered during even the worst of the Blitz. We used ten times as many bombers, which were bigger, stronger and carried three or four times as many bombs. Cologne was a compact city, while London sprawled. Cologne had a population less than one-tenth the size of London’s.

The only point of trying to destroy a city would be to attack the morale of the ordinary people, to make them wish to give up the war.

I could never forget the hundreds, the thousands of ordinary English people I met when I was with Mr Churchill’s double, touring the most damaged parts of our cities. I saw again and again how manifestly unbeaten they were, how resistant they had become to loss and destruction, how keen they were to pay back the Germans in their own coin. They did not want to give up. Their morale was intact. They wanted to hit back, to bomb German cities in the way they had bombed ours, but with a force ten or a hundred times greater.

So there I was on their behalf. Cologne lay overwhelmed beneath me.

I could not put out of my mind the look in the eyes of Rudolf Hess, the captive Deputy Führer, when he told me he had flown to Britain to stop the war, to forge a peace between our two countries. He finally accepted that Churchill himself had sent me to hear what he had to say - until then Churchill had not listened to him. and now I was there on his behalf. But after I left, Hess remained in prison, silenced for the rest of the war.

We flew on, high above Germany. The land was dark beneath us. Occasionally, a squirt of tracer fire would rise up towards us from some isolated gun position, but mostly we flew unchallenged. Half an hour after we had left Cologne and were flying across Holland towards the coast, the rear-gunner came on the intercom and reported that he could still see the glow of the burning city, far away behind us. We headed out across the North Sea, thinking of home. Soon we were there. Later we learned that more than forty British bombers had been shot down during the raid on Cologne before the German guns fell silent. Each plane had carried five, six or seven young men. The arithmetic of loss was all too easy to work out, but impossible to understand.

Two nights later, June I, we went back to Germany. Once again Bomber Command put up a force of one thousand bombers, the target this time the industrial city of Essen in the heart of the Ruhr valley. Later in the same month we returned to Essen, then twice more. We called it ‘turning over the rubble’, thinking that after the first raid there could be nothing left standing, but whenever we went back the German guns blazed out with terrific ferocity. The morale of the German people remained intact, their wish to take revenge on us more sharply defined with every raid. So we overwhelmed them, then flew home in the dark. What were we achieving?

I was approaching the end of my tour of duty, the one that had started at the outbreak of war. There was one more mission I had to fly. This was to Emden, a port on the north coast of Germany that was easy to locate because of its unique position: it faced south across an inlet bay. Even so, with such a compact target, so readily identifiable, the raid turned out to be another ‘failure’ for Bomber Command. Most of the bombs were later discovered to have fallen in the open countryside between the target and Osnabruck, some eighty miles away. Nine British aircraft were shot down for the sake of it. At the end of the raid I landed the Lancaster safely at Tealby Moor, and the next day I went on leave. By the time I returned to the squadron a week later my crew, whose own tours still had several missions outstanding, had dispersed.