Aircrew: The Story of the Men Who Flew the Bombers (19 page)

They flew to bomb Stuttgart, but had to return early because of engine trouble. In a later raid they bombed the same target without incident. Operations to Düsseldorf and Essen also passed off comparatively free from trouble. Ben, of course, was two missions behind the rest of the crew. In order to even the score, he flew as navigator for a Warrant Officer Skinner on one raid, and then did another to Le Gâteau. This second trip was bedevilled by bad weather. They encountered cloud all the way to the target. The rain was so intense it was driving through the window frames and the joints in the panels of the fuselage, soaking both the occupants and their equipment. All the electronic gear was inoperative as the radio and Gee navigation aid became saturated. Ben had to plot the course by dead reckoning alone. On the return journey he was reasonably satisfied that he had their position worked out.

‘Where are we, navigator?’

‘Approximately between Beachy Head and Reading.’

But the pilot was not prepared to rely on the word of an
unknown navigator. ‘I’m going below cloud to establish our position more accurately’

‘Fair enough, Skipper, but remember the minimum safety height in this area is 1,500 feet.’

Ben watched with growing anxiety as the aircraft descended through impenetrable cloud. Concentrating on his duplicate altimeter he saw the needle fall to 1,500 feet. They were still in cloud. 1,200 feet – still in cloud.

‘Skipper, we’re below the safety level.’

‘Don’t worry.’

Down they went – 1,000 feet. Ben knew there was high ground in this locality at around that altitude and his altimeter had been set at sea level. At last at under 800 feet they broke through the cloud base and saw the misty countryside below them. All of a sudden a massive grey structure loomed up to port, perilously close. It had battlements and turrets and an enormous round tower dominating the whole building. Pulling back on the stick, the pilot hauled the Halifax up into the cloud once again.

‘OK, navigator. That was a damn good pinpoint. What was it?’

Ben took a deep breath inside his oxygen mask before replying, ‘That was Windsor Castle!’

Beyond Nottingham the weather cleared and they landed at base without any problems. As soon as they were on the ground Ben tackled the pilot over his stupidity in disobeying the rules. As a Flying Officer he was outranked by his temporary skipper, but his anger knew no bounds when he thought of the danger imposed on the entire crew, the possibility of wrecking a valuable aircraft, and, most awful to contemplate, how near they might have come to wiping out the Royal Family.

A blazing row developed in which the Flight Lieutenant tried to pull rank. But Ben stood his ground, convinced that he was in the right. In the end he marched off and reported the matter to the Wing Commander. The pilot was severely reprimanded.

He was glad to return to his own crew, stalwart, efficient, cheerful, and yet unbelievably youthful:

At the time of their first raid, on Berlin, Ben worked out that the average age of the crew was 20 years and 9 months.

In spite of their youth, there can be no doubt that Bomber Command aircrew took their duties very seriously. Whatever their task in the aircraft they felt a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of their fellow crew members. It was this intense crew loyalty that enabled the system to work at all. Men would rather have forfeited their lives than let down a comrade. Ben’s greatest worry as a navigator was the thought of making an error without realizing it, and then, perhaps, finding he had exposed his crew to extra danger by flying alone, outside the protection of the main bomber stream. He once made what he considered to be a glaring boob. In the navigator’s working area some of the appropriate dials used by the pilot were duplicated. The altimeter, as we have already seen, was one of them. They were known as ‘repeaters’ and included the aircraft’s compass – a DR (distant reading) compass – and the API, an integral part of the Air Position Indicator, which enabled the navigator to read out the latitude and longitude of air position, according to the air speed fed into it, and the compass bearing fed into it relative to the point he had set when he started.

Having set the base point of latitude and longitude it would, from then on, always indicate the
air
position of the aircraft at ‘the time read’, until it was reset. To find the
ground
position, a wind vector was applied to it according to the length of time the aircraft had been flying, and the variation in winds through different levels.

Ben did not realize it at the time (the Station Navigation Officer found out afterwards) that he had wrongly reset the Air Position Indicator after leaving the target by one whole degree of longitude. This meant that he was working on a position 40 nautical miles from where they actually were!

It was when they reached the French coast in the early hours of the morning that they were able to identify a visual pinpoint. If the indications he had been working on had been accurate, then
they could only have been flying through a wind of 150 knots, which would have been nonsense.

We have already discussed how busy navigators were. Ben, like the others, followed a set routine to establish the bomber’s air position once every twelve minutes, either by DR, visual sighting, a Gee fix, or radio bearings. It took him six minutes to complete his calculations and do the plotting. This left him six minutes free to try to warm his hands on the heater behind him, haul on his various layers of gloves, and then, after a pause, peel them off again in time for the next round of work. This was the procedure carried out continuously over the whole period of a six, seven, eight or nine hour mission.

He was happy in his work and would not have swapped his navigator’s job for any other in the aircraft. His sympathy was always for air gunners sitting in lonely isolation in their cramped turrets, remote from the rest of the crew, strained eyes constantly scanning each quarter of the dark sky, constantly on the alert for impending danger, and often frozen almost beyond endurance.

Soon after their Berlin raid, they flew to Schweinfurt on the night of 24/25 February, to bomb the home of Germany’s main ball-bearing factories. Bomber Command lost thirty-three aircraft on this mission. It was not until the flight engineer warned that they were consuming far too much fuel on the return trip that they realized the Halifax must have been hit by the flak over the target. Petrol was obviously pouring out of a damaged fuel feed. Ben did some rapid figuring. No chance of getting all the way back to base. Might possibly make the English coast and flop down at Ford or Tangmere:

‘How far to the coast, Ben?’

‘10 minutes.’

‘How much fuel left, Douggie?’

‘5 minutes.’

‘Looks as though we’ re going to get our feet wet boys!’

‘Mayday! Mayday! Are you receiving us?’ No reply.

‘Mayday! Mayday! Are you receiving us?’ No reply.

‘Mayday! Mayday! Are you receiving us?’

‘Hello Mayday. Hello Mayday. Receiving you loud and clear. This is Friston. I repeat, this is Friston.’

‘Where the hell is Friston, Ben?’

‘Well, there’s no Friston aerodrome marked on the map. The only Friston I know is a little village up on the top of the cliffs just to the west of Eastbourne.’

‘Hello, Mayday! This is Friston. We are putting out flares. Repeat. We are putting out flares.’

The crew of H for ‘Hollander’spotted them at once. With fingers crossed, and the notoriously inaccurate fuel gauges showing zero, they came straight in to land. As they rolled to a stop a combined sigh of relief came from seven throats. They learned that Friston was a fighter ‘drome being used by a Polish Spitfire squadron.

After a good meal and sound sleep, they strolled out to look at their aircraft the following morning. The bulky Halifax had landed on a short grass runway on top of the cliffs at Beachy Head. ‘Dutch’ became involved in discussions with Flying Control about the length of the field and the practical possibility of getting the bomber into the air from such a short take-off area. His attitude was, ‘We got her down here, we’ ll get her off again.’

Then bad weather took a hand. Swirling snow and an ice-bound surface closed the airfield, putting take-off out of the question. ‘Right,’said Ben. ‘This is a golden opportunity. My home is only just down the road in Brighton. I’m taking you all home to see the folks!’ They caught the Southdown bus and were soon in town. At that time Brighton was not only a Holding Centre for aircrew but also the home of an Aircrew Punishment Unit in which ‘incorrigibles’ underwent a period of correction for naughty behaviour while in the air – low flying over girlfriends’ houses and the like.

Because of this Ben’s home town was infested with service policemen who eyed Hollander’s crew suspiciously as they sloped along the pavements in their flying boots, coloured scarves, worn battle-dresses and no caps. The flyers felt certain they would be pounced on at any moment for being improperly dressed, in which case the crew were ready with a first-class excuse. But they were never accosted – some primeval instinct might have prompted the cops not to interfere, or maybe it was the sight of Ben’s Flying Officer ribbon that deterred them.

When the weather cleared a little they returned to Friston. A
sure-fire scheme had been worked out to get the old ‘Hallibag’safely into the air before it ran out of grass at the edge of the cliffs. Substantial wooden chocks were placed under its wheels with ropes attached to a couple of farm tractors. Johnny revved up the four Merlins until the bomber was almost leaping over the blocks. Then, as he signalled to the drivers, the tractors tugged the chocks away and it shot down the field like a stone released from a catapult. By the time it reached the cliff it was already airborne. They set course for base, map-reading their way over a snow-covered England, little realizing what was waiting for them.

Ben’s mother had a friend whose husband was a reporter working for the
Daily Mirror
in Fleet Street. He had sussed out the story and, using a fair amount of journalistic licence, had written a piece which appeared with Ben’s photograph in that day’s edition:

THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER

As she prepared dinner in her home at Stanmer Park Road, Brighton, Mrs Edith Bennett heard the roar of a low-flying British aeroplane.

‘Bless ‘em all,’she murmured, for her only son, Flying Officer Vernon Bennett, is navigator of a bomber.

The big bomber passed over the house, dropped towards the downs …

An hour passed …

Mrs Bennett heard the garden gate click and seven young men in flying kit tropped down the path.

‘How do, Mum?’said one of them. ‘I thought we’ d look you up in passing.’

Predictably, when they walked into the mess after landing at their home base in Snaith, they were greeted by raucous shouts of derision from their fellow aircrew and had to suffer continuous repetition of a ditty hastily composed for the occasion:

‘Out of the blue came Hollander’s crew! Ta-ra! Ta-ra!

Veteran aces the way the flew! Ta-ra! Ta-ra!’

etc., etc., followed by the chorus:

‘The Man Who Came to Dinner!’

Their story had earned its place among 51 Squadron’s store of legends. On the more serious side, Ben was shaken to find that in
the short time they had been away some of his best friends had gone missing. In his diary he noted, ‘Poor old Jackson and Love bought it at Schweinfurt. McKenzie’s a prisoner of war’.

Normally Bomber Command aircrew were granted a week’s operational flying leave every six weeks. The only thing he hated about this was returning to the squadron to find that during his absence more crews had disappeared. On one occasion they arrived back to discover that their own kite, in which they put so much trust, had been flown by another crew while they were away and had been lost.

During these breaks in flying Ben looked up old acquaintances and made the most of the many bars in Brighton. He also put in some time encouraging youngsters who had an interest in flying. His future mother-in-law was the head of the Women’s Junior Air Corps. He enjoyed teaching her girl cadets morse, the theory of flight, basics of navigation, and even air traffic control. He illustrated this last function by getting the girls to ‘fly’ round in circles with their arms outstretched to simulate the wings of the aircraft. Then the ‘controller’ would bring them in to land in the correct order!

Mother-in-law to be was a born organizer. She knew the mayor and had arranged that, after her daughter Pam’s marriage to Ben, the reception should take place in the impressive banqueting hall of Brighton Pavilion. Everything had been set for the great occasion on Saturday, 11 March 1944, right down to the last detail. All the guests had received their invitations and Ben had been granted 14 days’ leave.

At 8 am on Friday, 10 March, he got up in preparation for his leave. At 10.30 am came the shock; leave was cancelled and he was told to prepare for operational flying. His diary, written at the time, says, ‘If I have to fly, I think I will bale out. Am hopping mad.’ Rushing off to see his Wing Commander, he pleaded in vain. ‘So sorry Ben. Quite understand how you feel, but I’ ve lost so many crews lately, I can’t spare a single bod.’

Ben was desperate and unprepared to let the matter rest. He asked permission to see the Station Commander. Again, a stone wall. ‘Sorry Bennett, but I have to support your Squadron Commander’s decision.’

Still determined that the most important day in the lives of Pam and himself should not be ruined, he tried one last desperate throw. ‘Permission to see the Air Officer Commanding, please, Sir.’ The Group Captain thought for a moment. ‘Fair enough, Bennett. You are entitled to that privilege.’