All Hell Let Loose (78 page)

Throughout 1940–41, naïveté persisted within the RAF about the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s operations. ‘The briefings were very, very good,’ said Ken Owen, a nineteen-year-old navigator. ‘They made us feel we were going to hit an important target, doing important damage to the Germans. And of course we all listened to the BBC bulletins next morning, which trumpeted our success; there was a tremendous amount of self-delusion. We thought we were knocking hell out of them. Maybe twelve times [out of thirty “trips”] I think we bombed the right place; otherwise it was either the wrong place or ploughed fields.’

Despite the limited impact of the strategic air offensive in its early years, most of the RAF’s leaders retained a visionary faith not only in what bombing might do, but also in what it had already accomplished. In September 1942, Air Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman wrote to Britain’s air chief Sir Charles Portal complaining of the extravagant claims made by some commanders: ‘In their efforts to attract the limelight they sometimes exaggerate and even falsify facts. The worst offender is C-in-C Bomber Command.’ Freeman cited claims published in the media about the achievements of some recent raids on Germany: ‘The damage at [Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf] is described as fantastic. I believe this to be untrue … I suggest that you might … send a circular letter to commanders-in-chief … impressing on them the need to adhere strictly to the unvarnished truth in accounts of operations … I am alarmed about the effect which the present tendencies must shortly have on the good name of the R.A.F.’

But, during the long years before Western Allied armies engaged the Germans in strength, it suited not only the air chiefs, but also Britain’s prime minister and America’s president, to collude in proclaiming the triumphs of bombing. Sir Arthur Harris, who became Bomber Command’s C-in-C in February 1942, said: ‘Winston’s attitude to bombing was “Anything to put up a show.” If we hadn’t [used Bomber Command] we would only have had the U-boat war, and as he said, defence of our trade routes was not an instrument of war.’ Churchill regarded the bomber offensive as a vital weapon in Western relations with Stalin, in some small degree assuaging the Soviet warlord’s bitterness about alleged Anglo-American sluggishness in launching a second front.

Ken Owen flew his first 1942 trip, to Kassel, in a mood of euphoria. ‘I was in a daze. It was sheer excitement – the briefing, sitting in the aircraft preparing for take-off. There was bright moonlight. We found the target – and plenty of flak. I was far more scared on the second “op”. My feet were cold, I was sweating under my arms. It didn’t take long for two kinds of reputations to be established: first, there were the “gen crews” – the real “press-on types”; then there were the ones who didn’t like it at all. Two or three were voted most likely to get the chop, some because they were so frightened they were likely to do something stupid … One or two pilots were shit-scared; one or two gunners froze in their turrets. Sometimes people got the chop because of a terrible lack of discipline in their crews.’

Aircrew became intimately familiar with the stench of hot rubber and petrol in the planes, sometimes also of cordite from their hammering guns and vomit from frightened men. Several times, Owen’s wireless operator threw up as the aircraft took violent evasive action. ‘If you were coned [by searchlights], you’d fly towards somebody else in the hope they’d pick them up instead of you. There was a tremendous element of cynicism and callousness – “Thank Christ it’s someone else.” I honestly can’t remember the names of many of the men who got the chop. They were only there about a fortnight. We were quite slow to realise that flying was becoming a dangerous occupation; that element of excitement kept us going, and morale was high. There were problems, of course, but I never blamed higher authority because I felt that we were all learning together.’

The intimacy of the relationships between members of bomber crews is a cliché, but was by no means universally valid. B-24 navigator Harold Dorfman respected his pilot’s skill, but ‘we hated each other … After a row on a training flight, we never talked to each other except about the mission.’ Jack Brennan, from Staten Island, was twenty-one when he joined the air force, to his family’s fury. ‘“We could have kept you out,” they said. But I was one of the kids who wanted to be a hero.’ The experience of flying twenty-four missions against Germany with an incompetent and cowardly pilot cured him of such delusions. ‘All the time, I wished I had gone into something else. We got hit almost every trip. The only good thing was that we had decent living conditions compared with the guys on the ground.’ His crew’s combat experience ended ingloriously, when the pilot persuaded them to parachute over Sweden while on a mission to Berlin. Brennan was one of three survivors, and he revelled in the comfort and safety of his subsequent experience as an internee: ‘It was like a summer camp.’

The nature of life and death on bomber stations discouraged relationships outside a man’s own crew. ‘If you had losses to the degree we had losses, you didn’t get terribly attached to people,’ said Etienne Maze, who flew RAF Halifaxes. ‘They came and they went. By the time you had done ten “ops”, you were a very old boy.’ On the day Ted Bone saw some acquaintances on a ‘missing’ list, he merely recorded in his diary: ‘Good bods Pyatt, Donner etc. Cleaned bike, wrote home, had crumpets and cocoa for supper in the billet.’ An American B-17 crewman wrote: ‘We learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago, as simply as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for another.’

Bomber operations imposed unique stresses upon participants, who knew the odds against surviving a ‘tour’. They boarded their planes at calm, well-regulated bases; flew out into the whitest heat of war over Europe; landed back amid the fields of Norfolk or Lincolnshire; visited the pub among local yokels the following evening; then did it all again two or three days later. Pilots, especially on night operations, enjoyed considerable personal latitude which they could exercise for good or ill. Most displayed remarkable determination and devotion to duty, but some faltered. Air Vice-Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, 5 Group’s commander, personally interviewed one pilot who turned for home when approaching Hamburg: the man offered as his only excuse that he found his aircraft drifting away from the main ‘stream’. This man told the group commander the crew had discussed their choices over the intercom and agreed to abandon the mission. ‘When I asked him why he, as captain, didn’t take the decision, he replied that they were all members of the sergeants’ mess, and it was their lives as well as his, so obviously he had to consult them.’

Ron Crafter, an electronic counter-measures operator aboard a Halifax, was hit in the face by shell splinters during an attack on V1 launching sites in June 1944. ‘The wounds were superficial, but I panicked. I have since found it rather difficult to live with – the most important moment of my life and I was found wanting. I have tried to convince myself that as I was only nineteen it was excusable.’ So it was, of course. A significant minority of expensively trained aircrew, after suffering such experiences, failed to complete their tours. The spirits of many reached their lowest ebb in the winter of 1943, during the RAF’s so-called ‘Battle of Berlin’. ‘Thirty sorties in an operational tour, with a loss rate of 4 per cent, was near the limit of human endurance … It was clear that morale was bad,’ Ralph Cochrane acknowledged.

Many men who flinched were treated with considerable harshness, because their superiors feared that indulgence would promote emulation. Reg Raynes was a wireless operator, sole survivor of a Hampden that crashed on a Norfolk beach in 1941 after returning badly shot-up from Berlin: ‘I clearly remember the complete silence as we went down. Both engines were gone and the rest of the crew never spoke.’ His next memory was of finding himself at a psychiatric hospital at Matlock in Derbyshire, from whence he was posted back to a bomber station, automatically demoted in rank. ‘I was unfit for flying duties, and no one seemed to know what to do with me. All they could see was a Wop/air gunner walking about in a rather aimless manner, and I don’t think they ever realised I was mentally ill.’

One morning he reported sick with acute head pains, and was sent to another hospital near Newcastle. ‘They took away my uniform and gave me an ill-fitting blue suit, white shirt and red tie. Apart from a sergeant brought back from Tobruk, all the rest of the patients were army privates, misfits who had slipped through the call-up by mistake. None of them had ever seen a gun, they discussed getting their “ticket” [out of the service] all day, and they nearly all did.’ Raynes was discharged from the air force in 1943; he suffered severe psychiatric difficulties for the rest of his life, but received only a 30 per cent disability pension.

Some men whom the RAF branded ‘LMF’ – ‘Lacking Moral Fibre’ – were given menial ground jobs; others were dispatched to ‘Aircrew Refresher Centres’ – punishment barracks – of which the most notorious was located outside Sheffield. Ken Owen said: ‘You joked about getting the chop, about flying reciprocal courses, but never about Sheffield.’ Yet Owen was among a small minority of aircrew who not only survived a ‘tour’ of thirty operations, but undertook a second, with a new crew in a Lancaster. ‘For the second tour,’ he said, ‘we were far more cynical and suspicious. [We asked ourselves]: “What sort of rear-gunner is this Macpherson? Let’s hope the little bastard can stay awake.” We were far more efficient, far more determined to be efficient, far more determined to survive; there was more talk about collisions over the target; we knew the German night-fighter system had improved enormously.’ One night Owen and his crew came back from a raid on the German rocket-development site at Peenemunde with two engines knocked out and the plane riddled with shrapnel holes inflicted by flak. They abandoned it over Norfolk, and were lucky enough to parachute safely to the ground, where they all met in Hunstanton police station. ‘I hated the whole business, then.’

American aircrew flying daylight missions found it especially harrowing to witness at close quarters horrors invisible to the RAF’s night fliers. A B-17 pilot wrote of one mission: ‘When a plane blew up, we saw [its crew’s body] parts all over the sky. We smashed into some of the pieces. One plane hit a body which tumbled out of a plane ahead. A crewman went out of the front hatch of a plane and hit the tail assembly … No chute. His body turned over and over like a bean bag tossed into the air … A German pilot came out of his plane, drew his legs into a ball, his head down. Papers flew out of his pockets. He did a triple somersault through our formation. No chute.’ If wartime aircrew were indeed an elite, they paid a terrible price for their privileges, facing greater risks than any other combatants save infantry riflemen and submariners.

2
TARGETS

Until 1943, the most important achievement of the Allies’ strategic air offensive was that it obliged the Germans to divert growing numbers of their fighters and dual-purpose 88mm guns from the Eastern Front to defence of the Reich. Berlin alone was defended by a hundred batteries of sixteen to twenty-four guns, each manned by crews of eleven. Though many gunners were teenagers ineligible for the front, the diversion of firepower and technology was important. Richard Overy argues convincingly that the German war effort suffered severely from the need to commit resources to home defence. Bomber Command and the USAAF made an important contribution by obliging the Luftwaffe to divert almost its entire 1943–45 fighter strength to Germany, conceding near-total air superiority over both eastern and western battlefields to the Allies. It is also plain that, while Albert Speer contrived to increase output even amid the massive air attacks of 1944, vastly more weapons would have been built – with serious consequences for the Allied armies – if factory operations had been unimpeded.

Between 1940 and 1942, only 11,228 Germans were killed by Allied bombing. From January 1943 to May 1945, however, a further 350,000 perished, along with unnumbered tens of thousands of foreign PoWs and slave labourers. This toll compares with 60,595 British people killed by all forms of German air bombardment including V-weapons between 1939 and 1945. During 1943, Bomber Command’s night offensive grew dramatically in strength, and the USAAF began to deploy formidable forces. Its chief, Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold, brilliantly promoted his service’s expansion, ‘supported as he was by a thoroughly able and quite unscrupulous staff’, in the words of an admiring British colleague. The USAAF’s wartime manpower rose from 20,000 to two million, from seventeen air bases to 345, and from 2,470 aircraft to 80,000, while the US Navy acquired 7,500 planes of its own. A steadily growing proportion of American bomber strength was deployed against Germany from British bases.

The outstanding precision-bombing feat of the war was the RAF’s May 1943 attack on the Ruhr dams, an epic of ingenuity, skill and courage, though its economic significance was modest. As early as 1937, the Air Ministry identified Germany’s water supply as a key factor in steel production, and in 1940 Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal urged an attack on reservoirs. The difficulty was to find appropriate means. Scientist and aircraft designer Barnes Wallis was independently pursuing the same purpose, and conceived the notion of bouncing depth-charges against dam walls. In February 1943 his project won official backing, despite the scepticism of Sir Arthur Harris. Wallis was asked to produce the weapons in time for an attack in May, when the Ruhr reservoirs would be full. A senior staff officer wrote, with conspicuous naïveté: ‘The operation against the dams will not, it is thought, prove particularly dangerous,’ because the targets were defended lightly, or not at all. Initial tests were carried out with a spherical charge, but in April Wallis determined upon a cylindrical alternative, backspun before release by an electrically-driven pulley so that it would ‘crawl’ down a dam wall to detonate thirty-three feet below the water’s surface. Astonishingly, in barely a month the four-ton weapons were built, and Lancasters specially modified to carry them.