The Separation
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 Mönchenglad-bach, 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 anti-aircraft 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 thei
r 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 1, 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 Osnabrück, 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.
I was re-posted within a few days, this time to 19 OTU, based near Liskeard in Cornwall. Like all pilots who completed a tour, I was to act as an instructor of new pilots for the next few months. A second tour of active duty would follow. I travelled down to Cornwall full of misgivings. For the next few weeks I went through the motions of being an instructor, but I was not good at it. Some people are born to be teachers, others are not. The only consolation during those weeks was that I was not the worst instructor at the unit.
Deeper worries were nagging away inside me, though. My recent experiences had made me think about the way we were fighting our air war, what we were trying to achieve with it, whether or not it was the right thing to be doing.
I began to question my own motives and abilities. I suspected that such a mental process was part of the reason why crews were taken out of the front line: after thirty operations most aircrew were in a state of burn-out. A spell at an OTU gave you an opportunity to recover, rebuild your morale, think things out, then, in theory at least, return to operational flying not only refreshed but with a wealth of experience. Experience was a key to survival. The wastage of new crews was terrible. Even by mid-1942 it was known that the average number of sorties a crew-member would survive was only eight. After three raids you were considered to be a veteran. Few men completed thirty flights.
As I worked with the new pilots I could not get these facts out of my mind. I knew that most of the young recruits I was working with would soon be dead.
So there was that burden. But in addition my own fears were growing. So long as I kept flying, I did not think about it. The fear was there all the time, but once a mission was under way, once the plane was on track and working well and the target was in sight, then I could take the dangers in my stride. Away from the action, though, there was too much time to think.
Why were we constantly attacking civilian areas of cities while tactical raids were comparatively infrequent? Why did we seem never to attack the U-boat construction yards or their service pens? Why were aircraft- and tank-factories, oil refineries and pipelines, shipbuilding yards, power stations, army bases, fighter stations never targeted, except when they happened to be in some more general target zone? Surely these were the very engines of Hitler’s war machine?
Why were we trying, night after night, to damage civilian morale when every ordinary person in Britain knew from their own experience that the effect on civilians was to make them more, not less, determined? What was the point of it all?
25
After my spell of duty at the OTU I reported to my new squadron, this one being 52 Squadron, based at RAF Barkston Ash, in Yorkshire. Not long after arrival I was assigned to a Lancaster and a crew, and I returned to operations.
We were at the end of summer in 1942 and Bomber Command was stepping up its campaign against Germany. There was a new commander-in-chief: the legendary, notorious and widely feared Air Marshal Arthur Harris, ‘Bomber’ Harris to the press, but ‘Butch’ (short for ‘Butcher’) to the crews who flew under his command.
Harris reorganized Bomber Command and introduced many changes. For all the increased danger to which Harris exposed us, morale began to improve. A sense of purpose surrounded what we were doing. Not only was the size of the bomber fleet increasing rapidly, the planes were being fitted with ever more complex electronic navigation, defence and target-locating devices. Certain top squadrons were designated as ‘pathfinders’, reaching the aiming zones ahead of the bomber stream, finding the targets, then laying down markers for the other planes to bomb. All pretence that we were trying to hit industrial or military targets was finally abandoned: the RAF followed a clear policy of area bombing, in which the houses, schools, hospitals and jobs of the German civilian population were what we were out to destroy.
I settled down to my second tour of duty with a sense of grim determination, closing my mind as far as possible to my doubts.
Gradually my number of completed missions began to notch up. I went to Flensburg, Frankfurt, Kassel, Bremen, Frankfurt again. At least two hundred bombers visited every target, and sometimes twice that number were sent, or even more. Our accuracy was improving, the percentage of aircraft we lost on each raid began to decline. The cities we visited were hit with increasing ferocity. They fought back when we arrived, they glowed like hot coals when we left.
It did not bear thinking about, so we thought only of ourselves, of our own survival. There was no end in sight to the war, so we were not due to finish yet.
In the middle of September 1942, after a raid on Osnabrück, I was given a weekend leave. I rode around the country lanes for a few hours on the motorbike before returning to the airfield. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. Two nights later, 52 Squadron was one of a dozen squadrons that visited Berlin. The big city, we called the place. Its size made it seem indestructible, but every time we went there we did our best to destroy it. That night we left the big city behind us, glowing in the dark, the smoke pouring into the moonlit sky.
I flew back to Germany another night and dropped bombs and incendiaries on the people who lived in Kiel. Later we went to Ludwigshafen, to Essen, to Cologne, to Düsseldorf, doing to them what we had come to do, overwhelming them from the air, then abandoni
ng them to burn behind us as we flew home through the long nights. Next was Wuppertal. With three hundred other RAF planes, we dropped bombs and incendiaries on the people who lived there. We overwhelmed the defences, then left the place burning in the night as we set off for home.
Two days after the Wuppertal raid we received a visit from one of the senior officers in 5 Group and were briefed on Bomber Command’s strategy for the next few months. Our raids were to intensify: more aircraft would be despatched on every mission, more and better bombs would be dropped, accuracy would be improved by electronic aids, a number of innovative defensive measures were to be introduced. New and recently revised maps of Germany were handed out and we were shown aerial photographs of industrial and residential complexes. We would become an irresistible force that would bomb the German people into surrender.