Aircrew: The Story of the Men Who Flew the Bombers (3 page)

This was the quality of aircrew transferred from Bomber Command to other duties. The command could ill afford to lose such men.

Over the course of the coming years the frittering away of men and machines was to continue in other ways. Crews, after being expensively trained in Bomber Command’s own operational training units, were then not infrequently transferred to Coastal Command, or sent overseas.

Thus the efforts to build up Bomber Command’s strength until it was equal to the immense task it had set itself, that of bringing Germany to her knees by strategic bombing, was constantly frustrated by factors quite unrelated to losses caused through enemy action.

I witnessed one or two examples of this ‘filching’ during my training. On one occasion some of us were asked if we would be prepared to transfer for duties with the army, serving as wireless operators in tanks fighting in the Western Desert. A few of our number volunteered to go, relishing the chance of immediate action. These young men were unhappy at the prospect of at least another year’s training in the RAF before seeing active service.

By the end of the Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe, too, had been taught by our fighter pilots that daylight bombing attacks were too costly in men and machines, even when the German bombers were accompanied by large fleets of escorting fighters. From then on, until their services were required the following year in Russia, the Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers also sought the cover of night to bomb British cities.

Previously, during the Battle of Britain, the German bomber force had concentrated on trying to destroy the RAF fighter fields in south-east England. Such was the intensity of the onslaught that Fighter Command was at one time in a critical situation.

On the night of 25/26 August, 1940, a force of forty-three British bombers, made up of Whitleys, Hampdens and Wellingtons, bombed Berlin. Six of the Hampdens, flying to the limit of their fuel capacity, were lost. Material damage to the cloud-covered city was negligible, yet the psychological effect on the Nazi leader was profound. The effrontery shown by British airmen in daring to fly
600 miles into the Fatherland to drop high explosive on the Third Reich’s capital city was too much for Adolf Hitler. Angrily he ordered his Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring, to retaliate with all his strength against London – only a few miles away from his front-line airfields in France.

Göring was anxious to restore his tarnished prestige. Previously he had confidently told Hitler that the RAF fighter force would be smashed in two weeks. This had not happened. On the contrary, because of the activities of that same fighter force, Luftwaffe bombers and their escorting fighters had fallen from the British skies in their hundreds since early August. And now another of the Reichsmarschall’s famous boasts, that ‘not a single bomb will fall on Germany’, had been blown apart by Bomber Command.

The commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe eagerly ordered round-the-clock bombing of London in the belief that the RAF’s stock of Spitfires and Hurricanes was almost depleted. Calculating that his enemy had only about a hundred fighters left, he underestimated by at least ten times. Also, by switching tactics at this crucial stage, by bombing the city and leaving the RAF airfields and control centres unmolested, he relieved Fighter Command of its most worrying problem, and in so doing he lost the battle.

Obliged in the end to concentrate on night bombing, the Luftwaffe inflicted severe suffering on the people of London. By the end of the year 13,000 citizens had been killed and a further 16,000 seriously injured. Many homes were destroyed, especially in the poorer areas of the East End. Numerous historic buildings were reduced to rubble. The docks suffered badly too, but Britain had other ports. In addition, much of Britain’s war industry was situated elsewhere, well away from London, particularly in the Midlands and the North.

Far from lowering civilian morale or causing panic, the common hardships inflicted by the bombing united Londoners in their determination to win through in the end. This indomitable spirit was equally evident among the people of all the ‘blitzed’ cities of Britain, Birmingham, Liverpool, Plymouth, Bristol, Swansea and Coventry, which in a single night lost 500 people, and a further 1,200 injured. 60,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged, a third of the city’s factories were put out of action, and the ancient
cathedral ruined. Yet, when 10,000 people were offered transport to leave the devastated city on the following day, only about 300 took up the offer.

There were no arguments at that time about it being morally wrong to bomb Germany. Such academic ‘afterthoughts’ only emerged when victory was in sight.

In their early night raids on the British Isles the German crews had three advantages: short flying distances to their targets; little effective interference from Britain’s primitive night defences; and an ingenious but simple system of intersecting radio beams that guided the Luftwaffe bombers to their targets. The first of these, the Knickebein, was soon countered by British scientists, but then a more accurate device known as
X-Verfahren
was introduced by the Germans and used to devastating effect against Coventry.

One member of our family had good reason to remember the consequences of what she insisted afterwards was the result of our scientists ‘bending the beam’. This was a common expression at the time among the civilian population for what was supposedly being done by the ‘boffins’ to divert the German bombers from their targets.

Auntie Annie lived on her own in a remote hill farm high on the mountains above the town of Llangollen in North Wales. One night the ‘Jerries’started to bomb Auntie Annie. Showing great courage, my Uncle Trevor, who lived in the valley, commandeered a wheel chair and lugged it up the mountainside to rescue the old lady. As he said afterwards, ‘With bombs exploding all round, I would never have believed it possible to come down a mountain so quickly, while guiding a wheelchair occupied by an elderly relative.’

An official postmortem on the raid came to the conclusion that the intended target had been the Mersey docks in Liverpool. It was a bright moonlight night at the time of the attack, and on that particular mountain there are large outcroppings of dark grey rock. It was thought that the German crews, thanks to a little ‘scientific misdirection’, had mistaken these dark patches for clusters of shipping moored in the River Mersey. I am pleased to report that both my aunt and her farm escaped without serious damage. Many rocks were badly splintered and two sheep were killed.

It is interesting to examine the positions occupied by the various crew members in Luftwaffe bombers. In the Junkers 88, for example, all four airmen occupied the same cockpit in the nose. The pilot sat high on the left, with the navigator close beside him or prone when bomb-aiming. The flight engineer was stationed just behind the pilot. He was also responsible for manning the upper rear gun. The wireless operator was to the engineer’s right, from where, when necessary, he could struggle down to fire the lower rear gun at the back end of the bombsight gondola. Similar seating arrangements also applied in Heinkels and Dorniers.

So German crews flew into battle literally shoulder to shoulder. This feature had been introduced into Luftwaffe bomber designs for two reasons. One was to facilitate crew communication, both visual and oral. The other was a belief that flying in such close proximity would help to sustain morale. Panic, it was thought, would be less likely to break out in the chummy environment of a shared cabin.

As a result of hard experience gained in the Battle of Britain, armament was substantially increased. At one time the unfortunate engineer was made responsible for manning no less than five separate hand-held guns. There must have been moments when the clatter and confusion in the ‘cosy cabin’, especially when a wounded comrade fell into your lap, produced a totally different effect on morale from that envisaged by the chairborne psychologists.

By contrast, crew members of RAF night bombers, with the exception of the Hampden, were more isolated. The gunners, particularly, led a lonely life in their power-operated turrets – a form of defensive armament not used on German bombers. Navigators and wireless operators worked in close proximity, as of course did the pilot and second pilot, until the latter was replaced by the flight engineer when the four-engined ‘Heavies’ took to the air. The bomb-aimer, when he arrived on the scene later in the war and took over responsibility from the navigator for dropping the bombs, usually stayed in his nose compartment except during take-off and landing. Aircrew kept in touch with each other via ‘intercom’ – an electrical inter-communication system.

Bomber Command may have been suffering disappointments
and frustrations at that time, but these were shared by the German flyers too. Colonel Werner Baumbach, one of Germany’s finest bomber pilots, wrote:

Hitler talked about ‘extirpating’ the English towns, and propaganda coined the word ‘coventrizing’ for the maximum degree of destruction which was deemed to have been inflicted on Coventry. In this night-bombing during that winter London figured pre-eminently in the German communiques and reports on the progress of the Luftwaffe’s ‘wearing-down’strategy – which was
not
in fact achieving its purpose … The mining of the Thames estuary and the Wash and attacks on shipping on moonlight nights were continued. Night bombing of various targets was intensified, though the English fighters and AA defences were continuously improving while the efficiency of the Luftwaffe was rapidly decreasing. …

At the beginning of 1941 the Luftwaffe High Command had to admit that England could not be reduced to impotence solely by night bombing, carried out as it was by inadequate forces … the German air war against her had failed.

The battle over England cannot be compared even remotely with what was to happen to Germany from 1942 onwards
.

This was the assessment of a Luftwaffe pilot who was later to become ‘General of Bombers’.

Inadequate those German raids against England may seem with hindsight, yet they inflicted more damage than Bomber Command was able to match when attacking targets in Germany during that period. In one raid on Berlin most of the bombs fell in the surrounding countryside, a few of which destroyed some farms. The topical joke in the German capital was: ‘Now they are trying to starve us out!’

Nothing daunted, as the winter of 1940 set in, RAF bombers continued to beat their way across Germany in defiance of the worsening weather. On occasion the targets were never found, or places were bombed up to a hundred miles from the designated aiming point – without the crews ever realizing they were in error. Blacked-out Germany remained mysterious, remote and vast beneath them. The signposts of radar, which were to become the guides of the future, were almost undreamed of then.

Compared with the colossal tonnage of later years, the weight
of bombs dropped on Germany by the RAF in 1940 was negligible. Yet the efforts of those valiant pioneers were far from wasted. Their attacks on the enemy brought a fierce satisfaction to those inhabitants of Britain who had suffered from the Luftwaffe’s bombing. It is true that official propaganda made the effect of these raids on the Third Reich seem far more devastating than it really was. A publication issued by His Majesty’s Stationery Office called
Bomber Command
presented a glowing report of what was being achieved. While admitting that our bomber force was not yet as big as the RAF would wish, it was, it said, nonetheless producing remarkable results. The book contained an inspiring map, captioned: ‘Attack at the Heart: The Raids on Germany’. It covered an area from the Baltic, south as far as Munich, and east beyond Dresden and Stettin. Against every major town and city in Germany were printed clusters of bombs in varying sizes. These bombs were grouped according to the number of raids supposed to have taken place on each target. Symbols represented munition works, power stations, aerodromes, seaplane bases, aircraft works, oil refineries, railways, docks and waterways, naval ships, and an all-embracing symbol entitled ‘various objectives’. Without doubt all these missions had been mounted, but how many targets had been
hit
, and by what number of aircraft, was not detailed.

The book was notable for some excellent photographs of Whitleys, Hampdens, Wellingtons and Blenheims, and crew members at their various stations inside the aircraft. There were action shots of bombs falling (by day of course), and aerial views of apparent damage to enemy installations by high explosive. It is significant that the ‘damage’ had to be pinpointed by arrows drawn across the photographs, in contrast to reconnaissance pictures taken in the later stages of the war when the devastation was all too obvious.

Even the smallest raid occasionally had an effect on the recipients out of all proportion to its destructive value. An outstanding example was a mission reported by an American correspondent, William L. Shirer. He was living in Berlin at the time when the USA was still neutral. During that period Germany also had a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. He wrote:

At this point in the conversation, say the German minutes, the
Führer called attention to the late hour and stated that in view of the possibility of English air raid attacks it would be better to break off the talk now, since the main issues had probably been sufficiently discussed.

That night Molotov gave a gala banquet to his hosts at the Russian Embassy on the Unter den Linden. Hitler, apparently exhausted and still irritated by the afternoon’s ordeal, did not put in an appearance.

The British did. I had wondered why their bombers had not appeared over Berlin, as they had almost every night, to remind the Soviet Commissar on his first evening in the capital that, whatever the Germans told him, Britain was still in the war and kicking. Some of us, I confess, had waited hopefully for the planes, but they had not come. Officials in the Wilhelmstrasse, who had feared the worst, were visibly relieved. But not for long.

On the evening of November 13, [1940], the British came over early. It gets dark in Berlin about 4 pm at this time of the year, and shortly after 9 o’clock the air-raid sirens began to whine and then you could hear the thunder of the flak guns and, in between, the hum of the bombers overhead … Molotov had just proposed a friendly toast and Ribbentrop [the Nazi Foreign Minister] had risen to his feet to reply when the air-raid warning was sounded and the guests scattered to shelter.

In the safety of the underground shelter of the Foreign Ministry conversation continued between the Germans and the Russians. … Molotov stated that the Germans were assuming that the war against England had already actually been won. If therefore [as Hitler had maintained] Germany was waging a life and death struggle against England, he could only construe this as meaning that Germany was fighting ‘for life’ and England ‘for death’.

This sarcasm may have gone over the head of Ribbentrop, a man of monumental denseness, but Molotov took no chances. To the German’s constant reiteration that Britain was finished, the Commissar finally replied, ‘If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are those bombs which fall?’
(From
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
.)