BOMBER BOYS

FIGHTING BACK

1940–1945

PATRICK BISHOP

Copyright

HarperPress

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Patrick Bishop asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Plans of Halifax and Lancaster bombers © Copyright The National Archives.

Plans of Stirling, Mosquito and Wellington bombers

© Crown Copyright RAF Museum

Maps of Cologne and Berlin © Copyright Royal Geographical Society.

Maps of Bomber Command Stations, Targets in Europe, Germany,

and the Ruhr Valley by John Gilkes.

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Source ISBN: 9780007189861

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 9780007280131

Version: 2014-09-17

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Prologue: Perkins

Introduction

1 Learning the Hard Way

2 Coventrated

3 ‘To Fly and Fight’

4 Crewing Up

5 Dying in the Dark

6 Enter ‘Butch’

7 The Feast of St Peter and St Paul

8 The Reasons Why

9 The Battle

10 A Select Gang of Blokes’

11 The Big City

12 The Chop

13 Crack Up

14 Home Front

15 Love in Uniform

16 D-Day Diversion

17 Tallboys and Tirpitz

18 Götterdämmerung

19 Forgetting

Epilogue: Went the day well?

Keep Reading

Notes

Bombers

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

To Peter, Margaret, Amelia

and Daniel

Maps

Prologue: PERKINS

In the early summer of 1961, sophisticated Londoners were laughing at an entertainment brought to them by four young Oxbridge graduates. Beyond the Fringe had been a great hit at the Edinburgh Festival the previous year. Now, night after night, smiling audiences in the capital left the Fortune Theatre feeling they had witnessed something fresh, audacious and above all very funny. The excitement that comes with the anticipation of sudden and unpredictable change was in the May air. The old, hierarchical Britain personified by the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, appeared to be tottering to an end. The shape of the future was hard to make out but it surely belonged to the young, the daring and the irreverent. Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore were the incarnation of all that.

One of the sketches was called ‘Aftermyth of War’. It made fun of legends created during wartime and already planted deep in Britain’s consciousness. There was quite a list. It mocked Neville Chamberlain and his ‘piece of paper’, stoical working-class Londoners and the Blitz spirit and even the Battle of Britain. Then it was the turn of the men who flew in the aeroplanes that bombed Germany.

The sequence opens with Peter Cook, in the uniform of a senior RAF officer, entering to the sound of airmen singing heartily around a piano.

COOK: Perkins! (Jonathan Miller breaks away from the singing.) Sorry to drag you away from the fun, old boy. War’s not going very well, you know.

MILLER: Oh my God!

COOK: … war is a psychological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of football ten men often play better than eleven?

MILLER: Yes, sir.

COOK: Perkins, we are asking you to be that one man. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back. Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.

MILLER: Goodbye, sir – or is it – au revoir?

COOK: No, Perkins.

The last lines got one of the biggest laughs of the night. In the stalls, sitting with his wife Margery Baker, Tony Iveson tried to laugh along with the rest. They both worked in the new world of television and were part of the emerging Britain. But not very long before he had been Squadron Leader Tony Iveson DFC of 617 Squadron, and at the front of the bombing war. ‘I didn’t like it,’ he said forty-four years later. ‘I remember being upset. I probably wouldn’t be now but at the time it seemed unnecessary, in view of how many we lost.’¹

Of the 125,000 airmen who passed through Bomber Command during the war, about 55,000 were killed. Twenty-one of them were called Perkins. The first to die was Flying Officer Reginald Perkins of 54 Squadron who was killed on the night of 14/15 November 1940. He was the pilot of a Hampden which took off from Waddington in Lincolnshire to bomb Berlin. Little is known about his death or those of his three crew mates. Their aircraft is ‘believed to have exploded in the air and crashed on the outskirts of Berlin’.² The last to die was Flying Officer Robert Perkins of 49 Squadron, the pilot of a Lancaster who was killed with the rest of his crew while bombing the Lutzkendorf oil refinery on the night of 8/9 April 1945, a month before the end of the war in Europe.³ Nothing at all is known about how they were lost.

As far as I am aware, no Perkins died bombing Bremen, but one might well have done. From 18 May 1940 until the end of the Second World War it was attacked some seventy times. As a result, about 575 aircrew were killed. So too were 3,562 residents.⁴ It is this aspect of Bomber Command’s war, the death of German civilians, that has preoccupied historians in the years since the Beyond the Fringe sketch. All the myths that were the butt of its jokes have since been re-examined and turned out to be remarkably resilient. It is Bomber Command’s reputation that has suffered the most. Re-evaluations have found the crews’ efforts to be at best misdirected and at worst little better than war crimes.

This last accusation is false and insults truth and justice. Bomber Command, as I have said, attacked Bremen frequently. The first bombs killed thirteen people. They also burned down two warehouses full of furniture confiscated from Jews who had understood what fate awaited them in Germany and fled. Bombers were busy over the city on the night of 17/18 January 1942. Only eight of the eighty-three aircraft dispatched found the target and little damage appears to have been done. The Nazi newspapers in the days following denounced the raiders as ‘terror fliers’. As they did so, sixteen Nazi bureaucrats met on 20 January in a villa at Wannsee outside Berlin to co-ordinate the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe.

The Nazis were to good as a black hole is to light. The effects of British and American bombing on Germany and the lands the Germans conquered were dreadful and it is right that they should be recorded and remembered. But the Allies’ real crime would have been to hold back from using any of the means at their disposal to destroy Hitler and those who sustained his war.

The argument over exactly what Bomber Command achieved will never be settled. One undeniable success, an awkward one to acknowledge nowadays, is that it altered Germany’s personality. Saturation bombing may not, as intended, have broken the Germans’ spirit. But it helped powerfully to bring about their post-war conversion to peaceful democracy.

History in its current mood has paid limited attention to the ethos and character of the men who fought this most extraordinary war. This book sets out to correct that imbalance. It is for, and about, Perkins. In the process I want also to redress a wrong. There is no national memorial to the men of Bomber Command, no one place where their sacrifice and contribution to victory are properly and thankfully commemorated. I hope that Bomber Boys will mark a first step in changing that.

Introduction After the Whirlwind

No one who saw what Allied bombing did to Germany forgot it. A traveller in an official delegation passing through Berlin two months after the German surrender noted in his diary: ‘Berlin … is ghastly. I could never have believed how complete the destruction is. We covered [about five miles] and saw less than a dozen undamaged houses and not one in ten was anything more than a burned-out shell.’

Soon afterwards he visited Potsdam, less than twenty miles to the west. ‘Bert Harris removed the town of Potsdam in half an hour one night in April,’ he wrote. ‘I have never seen anything so complete … the usual procession of handcarts, prams etc. and the same slab-faced people as in Berlin.’

The sight, he felt, was the finest possible lesson to the Germans of the folly of initiating wars. Yet he ‘came away feeling very sorry for these people and when I eventually said so I found all the others felt just the same.’¹

The man who wrote these words had played a central part in creating the scenes he witnessed. He was Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Charles Portal, who as Chief of the Air Staff had overseen the bombing campaign. ‘Bert Harris’ was his subordinate, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command who had put Allied strategic theories into devastating practice.

A little afterwards, a veteran pilot who had taken part in many of the raids flew over some of the areas he had bombed. ‘It was a fine clear day and we flew at 4,000 feet,’ wrote Peter Johnson, ‘a good height for an overall view and we saw as we passed something of what had happened to, amongst others, Hamburg, Lübeck, Hanover, the Ruhr towns, Cologne, Aachen and Düsseldorf and so south to Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Munich … the general devastation was almost unbelievable. In town after town hardly a building seemed to be intact, hardly a house seemed to be habitable. All that showed from the air were rows and rows of empty boxes, walls enclosing nothing … the whole area was, for the time being at least, dead, dead, dead.’

Johnson could not help wondering ‘whether this truly dreadful sight represented a degree of overkill, whether such destruction had really been necessary to stop the production of arms for the Nazis in the greatest industrial complex in Europe.’ He reassured himself with the thought that even when the Ruhr was encircled by Allied forces the German people ‘were still obeying Hitler’s frenzied calls for resistance to the last man.’²

The debris was to hang around accusingly for years. In March 1949 the American diplomat George Kennan returned to Hamburg where he had served in pre-war days. He visited the large residential districts east of the Alster. ‘Here was sweeping devastation, down to the ground, mile after mile,’ he wrote. ‘It had all been done in three days and nights in 1943, my host told me. Seventy-five thousand persons had perished in the process. Even now, after the lapse of six years, over three thousand bodies were estimated to be buried there in the rubble.’ [The actual number of victims of the raids carried out on Hamburg between 27-30 July 1943 was closer to 40,000 dead.]

These sights demanded reflection, and justification or judgement. The natural response of most of those who planned or carried out the attacks was the same as Portal’s. The Germans, unquestionably, had started it. They had, as Harris predicted in a much-repeated proverb, sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Kennan, however, felt differently. For the first time since the war ended, he wrote, ‘I felt an unshakeable conviction that no momentary military advantage – even if such could be calculated to exist – could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values, built up laboriously by human hands over the course of centuries for purposes having nothing to do with this war. Least of all could it be justified by the screaming non-sequitur, “They did it to us.”’³

The debate over the morality of all-out aerial bombardment had been under way long before the strategic air campaign began and would rumble through the post-war years to the present day. But the first reaction of those who gazed across the haunted mounds of rubble that were all that remained of scores of German city centres was simple awe at the destruction that had been wrought. The onlookers thought they knew what a blitzed town looked like. The results of what bombs did were on display in many of Britain’s major cities. But none of them looked like this.

During the war Bomber Command had been a priceless asset to government propaganda, as a symbol of Britain’s resolve and its willingness and ability to take the war to the enemy. Its actions were thoroughly publicized and its pilots and crewmen ranked as heroes. It fought a continuous campaign from the first day of the war to the last, interrupted only by the weather. The enormous effort and the great sacrifice of life this entailed were honoured and the destruction done to the enemy was presented as a vital element in the victory. In peacetime, the wrecked towns and the grave pits filled with the bones of civilians became an embarrassment and the Bomber Boys faded from the official legend. On the afternoon of 13 May 1945 Churchill broadcast his Victory in Europe speech. There was praise for everyone who had contributed to the war effort. But apart from an allusion to the damage done to Berlin, the main activities of the bomber crews were barely mentioned. There were campaign medals for those who had fought in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. There was to be no specific award for the men who had set about dismantling Hitler’s empire from the air.

The public memory of the air war was selective. People seemed inclined to consign the bombing campaign and those who had fought it to the past. The pilots of Fighter Command, however, had a special place in the post-war consciousness. Scores of books were written by them and about them. Men like Douglas Bader, Bob Stanford Tuck and ‘Sailor’ Malan were celebrities. They were The Few and the battle that they fought was relatively short, roughly four months from the beginning of July to the end of October 1940. The men who crewed the bombers were The Many and their struggle went on and on. Of the 125,000 who passed through the fire, only Guy Gibson and Leonard Cheshire won any lasting fame. Gibson had led the Dams Raid of May 1943, a feat of dash and daring, quite unlike the demolition work which Bomber Command conducted every night. Cheshire was known not so much for damaging people as for healing them, in the homes he set up after the war.

Nobody, it seemed, wanted victory to be tarnished by reminders of the methods that were used to obtain it. Harris had a simple explanation for the ambivalence. ‘The bomber drops things on people and people don’t like things being dropped on them,’ he remarked after the war. ‘And the fighter shoots at the bomber who drops things. Therefore he is popular whereas the bomber is unpopular. It’s as easy as that.’⁴

There was much in what he said. In the United States, which was never touched by aerial bombardment, there was no such uneasiness and the crews of the Liberators and Flying Fortresses were honoured alongside the rest of America’s fighting men and their deeds praised in films like Twelve O’Clock High. The official assertion that Americans were engaged in precise bombing, rather than the area bombing practised by the British, was widely accepted, even though the distinction often meant little to the people underneath.

The strategic air campaign fought by the RAF and the USAAF was a terrible novelty. For the first time, aeroplanes were used in huge numbers against large population areas to smash an enemy’s capacity to make war by destroying its industry and demoralizing its civilians.

The German Blitz of British cities over the winter of 1940–41 provided the campaign’s initial justification. Bomber Command’s subsequent raison d’être was that it was the main means of exerting direct offensive pressure on Germany, within its own territory. At first the crews flew smallish aeroplanes carrying negligible bomb loads and were guided by primitive navigational aids. In the month of February 1942 when Harris took over his men dropped 1,001 tons of bombs. Better aircraft, new technology, cleverer tactics, Harris’s ruthless style and – above all – the courage and skill of the crews, turned the air force into the most potent proof of Britain’s will to win. In the month of March 1945, with Allied troops closing on Berlin, they dropped 67,637 tons and the Americans 65,962. By the end, the hurt the Luftwaffe had done to Britain had been repaid over and over. German air attacks against the British Isles, including those by V weapons late in the war, killed just over 60,000. Estimates of the deaths caused by Allied bombing of Germany range between 305,000 and 600,000. The cities touched by the Blitz were scarred but not devastated. In 1945 Germany’s seventy biggest towns and cities were in ruins and one in five dwelling places destroyed.⁵

This disproportionality caused very little anxiety at the time. Germany had struck first and deserved the retribution the RAF was meting out. What concern might have been felt at the suffering of German civilians faded in the knowledge of the price the Bomber Boys were paying to deliver this vengeance. It was impossible to hide the losses and the government did not try.

This was a home-front war and civilians along the outbound and inbound routes to the Continent were present at the opening and closing scenes of the action. During the war years the RAF in Britain grew into the most visible of the services. In the bomber station-cluttered east and north there seemed almost as many airmen and-women as there were civilians. ‘By the time I got there Lincoln had turned blue,’ remembered Reg Payne, a wireless operator who was based at Skellingthorpe just outside the city.⁶

Bomber Command grew and grew as the volunteers arrived in numbers that never slackened even during the darkest hours of its campaign. Behind each man flying, there were many more keeping them in the air. There were fitters and riggers and armourers maintaining the huge aeroplanes. There were WAAFs who drove the crews to their hangars and staffed the operations rooms when ops were on. There were the women who served them their dinner before they took off and, with luck, their breakfast when they returned home. RAF men met and mingled with local women in dance-halls and pubs, flirting with them, sometimes sleeping with them, often marrying them. Homesick young men were adopted by families and would slip away for an afternoon in front of a coal fire in a front parlour that reminded them of the family life they had left behind.

The many Britons who had seen the RAF going into action, droning overhead on their way to and from Germany and France and Italy, relished the sight. They learned of what they did there from the newspapers and BBC radio for whom Bomber Command’s activities provided the main source of good news for much of the war. The tone of the reports was exultant. ‘The Vengeance Begins!’ was the strapline on the Daily Express front-page story of Monday 1 June 1942 announcing the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne. The sky over the city was ‘as busy as Piccadilly Circus’. One bomber passed over every six seconds and 3,000 tons of bombs were dropped in ninety minutes [The real figure was 1,455 tons]. It was particularly pleasing to report that the official communiqué from Berlin admitted that ‘great damage’ had been done. ‘Germans squeal “havoc, misery”’ was the headline on the story of how the Nazis had reacted to the raid.

The RAF had saved the country from invasion by winning the Battle of Britain. It had failed, it was true, to prevent the Blitz. But now, night after night it was carrying the war to the Reich, paying the Germans back in kind and contributing mightily to the downfall of Hitler and the Nazis.

That was how it was seen by British civilians as they read accounts of devastating attacks on previously obscure towns such as Essen, Duisburg and Gelsenkirchen and great cities like Hamburg and Cologne and, above all, Berlin. This was how it was presented by Harris, a natural propagandist, who strove to create the impression that with each raid the road to victory and peace was one step shorter. This was what was believed by the majority of the men who were flying the aeroplanes. They tended to be bolder and more imaginative than the rest of their contemporaries. Flying was dangerous but they preferred its perils and the relative informality of RAF life to the drudgery of existence as a soldier. In letters and diaries they reveal a high degree of idealism and optimism and a strong sense that they were fighting not only to destroy a present evil but also to lay the foundations of a future good.

In a letter to the father of his friend Andrew ‘Paddy’ Wilson, who was killed during a raid on Düsseldorf in June 1943, Sergeant John Lobban, the sole survivor of the crew, wrote: ‘They died for the greatest of causes, the freedom of the peace-loving nations and I only wish that fate could have let us play a greater part in bringing the war to a close.’ It had been their first operation.⁷

Such idealism is found mainly in the young. Many of the Bomber Boys were barely out of their teens, though the almost constant strain they lived with made them seem older. They were called Dougie and Ron and Ken and Reg and Bill. They came from the middle reaches of society and were strongly marked by their time. In their short lives they had felt the numb emotional pain left by the last war and sensed the mounting dread among their elders as the next one approached. They knew what poverty was and had witnessed the cruelties of interwar capitalism. If there was a dominant political outlook among the crews it was a mildly sceptical socialism and belief in social justice. But overlying it always was a profound sense of duty. None of them set out to destroy German cities and few cared to reflect too closely on the effects of their bombs. But like the rest of their generation, they possessed a patriotism and respect for authority that had barely been dented by their knowledge of the First World War. It was easier for them to do what they did because they tended to believe what they were told about the purpose and progress of their struggle. It was an outstanding peculiarity of the strange new conflict they were engaged in that there was no real measure of gain. Armies could gauge success by the amount of ground taken or the number of enemy killed or captured. Navies could do so by the quantity of enemy tonnage sunk. But how did you judge the achievements of a bombing campaign?

The authorities continually proclaimed the effectiveness of Bomber Command’s actions. Early communiqués created an illusion of extraordinary efficiency, of bombs slanting down on strictly military targets with scientific precision. This optimistic view was based largely on the reports of the pilots dropping the ordnance, an unreliable measure as it was to turn out. It was only after two years of war, when a report based on an analysis of aerial photographs revealed the hopeless inaccuracy of most bombing, that tactics and equipment improved and the gap between reality and propaganda began to close. By the end of the war Bomber Command could obliterate any target it wished to and did so, sometimes flattening towns whose military importance was minuscule. But the value of such destruction was always open to question and afterwards there was disagreement over what it was that Bomber Command had achieved.

Harris lived another forty years after the last bomb was dropped. Right until his death he fought to persuade the world that his Command’s contribution to victory had been decisive. His arguments were based not so much on the data provided by the American and British official surveys of damage conducted after the war, but more on the word of Hitler’s munitions minister, the silky and self-interested Albert Speer. The surveys themselves failed to settle the arguments that raged throughout the war over how bomber power should be applied and started a new round of controversy. The questions of how much material harm bombing did to the German war effort, and whether the energy and sacrifices involved were worth it, have never been fully answered and never will be.

It was even more difficult to determine the psychological effect of bombing. Bombs were spiritual as much as physical weapons. Air strategists had been arguing since aeroplanes were invented that the moral power of bombing was as great as anything it did to factories or homes, perhaps much greater. By destroying the will of workers to work, air attacks could do as much effective damage as they did when they smashed up a steelworks or assembly line.

This convenient belief grew as it became clear that pre-war assumptions about bombing accuracy were absurdly optimistic. The first bombs were aimed at small targets and hit nothing. Better then to aim at a large target and hit something – anything – for in a built-up area no bomb would be wasted. Even if a bomb missed the factory it was aimed at, the chances were it would hit the home of someone who was employed there. It might kill him and his family. Death or fear of death would keep him away from work. If enough bombs were dropped, so the theory ran, workers might eventually turn against their rulers and force them to stop fighting.

Even before the war the evidence available from the German and Italian bombardments of Madrid and Barcelona suggested that this was not necessarily so. Britain’s own experience of the Blitz pointed to a more startling conclusion: that aerial bombardment could actually toughen resolve and deepen resistance. For much of the war, there was a prevailing belief that Germany would crack if only it was hit hard and often enough. The RAF’s pre-war professional judgement that in a totalitarian state, coercion trumped public opinion, was soon forgotten in the desperation to achieve results.

The lack of any accurate understanding of what the campaign was achieving was characteristic of the oddly disconnected way in which the war was waged. Even those dropping the bombs felt they were engaged in a surreal exercise. Looking down from a Lancaster or Halifax at Essen or Berlin from 20,000 feet you saw nothing that connected you to the earth you knew, only a diabolical son et lumière of smoke and fire. ‘I would try to tell myself … that this was a city,’ wrote Don Charlwood, an Australian navigator with 103 Squadron. ‘A place with the familiar sights of civilization. But the thought would carry little conviction. A German city was always this, this hellish picture of flame, gunfire and searchlights, an unreal picture because we could not hear it or feel its breath. Sometimes when the smoke rolled back and we saw streets and buildings I felt startled. Perhaps if we had seen the white, upturned faces of people, as over England we sometimes did, our hearts would have rebelled.’⁸

Harris liked to call the successive phases of the air war ‘battles’. There was a Battle of Hamburg, a Battle of the Ruhr, a Battle of Berlin. But they were not battles as most people understood the word. There was not one enemy, waiting and visible, but many. The crews were constantly at the mercy of the weather and mechanical failure. On the approach routes and over the targets they faced searchlights, flak and night-fighters. There was no relaxation on the way home. The last minutes were sometimes as dangerous as the time over target as the skies above the base filled with aircraft, many of them sieved with flak and cannon holes, clinging to the air with their last few gallons of petrol, praying for the signal to touch down.

Flying in bombers was an extraordinarily dangerous activity. Harris, with his usual harsh honesty, asked people to bear in mind that ‘these crews, shining youth on the threshold of life, lived under circumstances of intolerable strain. They were in fact – and they knew it – faced with the virtual certainty of death, probably in one of its least pleasant forms.’⁹

Altogether 55,573 Bomber Command aircrew – British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealanders and others – were killed. That is out of a total of 125,000 who served. Another 8,403 were wounded and 9,838 taken prisoner. In simple terms that means 44.4 per cent of those who flew, died. The real picture was rather grimmer. Many of those included in the overall aircrew figure were still training when the war ended and never saw action. According to one study, the true figure is closer to 65 per cent. The chances of death then, were appallingly high, far higher than those facing soldiers and sailors. The life expectancy of an airman was considerably shorter even than that of a junior infantry officer on the Western Front in 1916.¹⁰ To Peter Johnson who swapped a cushy instruction post for operational flying, the enterprise sometimes seemed like the Charge of the Light Brigade, over and over again.

It was no wonder that crews discussed obsessively the odds on their survival and tried to discern some pattern in the tapestry of death. It was very confusing. Some ‘sprog’ crews fresh from a training unit got the ‘chop’ first time out. But so did veterans on their last but one trip of their thirty-operation tour. Good pilots died inexplicably and poor ones blundered through. It was all down to luck and Lady Luck, capricious tart that she was, had to be wooed and cosseted constantly. The modern young men in the bombers were as superstitious as mediaeval peasants. Final preparations would be thrown into chaos if someone lost his lucky silk stocking or remembered he had forgotten a pre-operation ritual. They also developed a mediaeval fatalism. Flying was ‘dicing’ and death was ‘the reaper’.

But despite death’s towering presence, it could still seem curiously remote. It was a common experience to see an aeroplane just like your own, ahead of you in the bomber stream, suddenly explode as flak ignited hundreds of gallons of petrol and thousands of pounds of explosive. It was not unusual to watch as a night-fighter nosed upwards beneath the pregnant belly of an unsuspecting neighbour and with one squirt of its vertically-directed guns sent it screaming down.

After witnessing these dreadful sights, crews were often struck by the complexity and selfishness of their feelings. ‘Suddenly,’ wrote Harry Yates, a Lancaster pilot, ‘ahead of us in the stream a vic of three kites was consumed in a prodigious burst of flame which immediately erupted outwards under the force of the secondary explosion. The leader had been hit in the bomb bay, the others were too close. No one could have survived, I knew. There was no point in looking for parachutes. I flew on straight and level, Tubby standing beside me, both of us dumbstruck by the appallingly unfair swiftness and violence of it all. But there was still that deeply-drawn breath of relief that somebody else, and not oneself, had run out of luck. And hard on the heels of that was a pang of guilt. One grieved for whoever was in the kites and wondered if friends might not be coming home …’¹¹

For all the danger, operations involved little that could be described as exciting or could later be interpreted as glamorous. There were stretches of tedium. For wireless operators and bombaimers there was little to do for much of the time. Only the navigator and the pilot were kept permanently occupied and there was not much fun in flying bombers. Piloting a Lancaster was nothing like skidding across the skies in a Spitfire. It was a task rather than a pleasure, requiring endless tiny adjustments and constant vigilance. Guy Gibson, the leader of the Dams Raid, compared bomber pilots to bus-drivers.

There was a complete absence of comfort. The rear gunner, stuck at the ‘arse end’ of a Lancaster, froze. The wireless operator, stuck next to the port inner engine, often roasted. Everyone was swaddled in multiple layers of clothing surmounted by parachute harness and Mae West lifejacket. It was hard work moving around the cramped, equipment-stacked interior, where every edge was sharp and threatened injury.

On the ground life was far removed from the ease of the RAF’s pre-war existence and there were few of the comforts or entertainments available to the fighter pilots of 1940 when they touched down at the end of the day. Writing to his wife from his first squadron, Flying Officer Reg Fayers was anxious to dispel any idea that the organization he had joined resembled ‘Max Aitken’s RAF’. Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s son, had fought in the Battle of Britain and was a model of style and sophistication. ‘You are fastidious and sweetsmelling cleanliness,’ Fayers declared. ‘You are gentle, you are comfort … the RAF is opposite in all respects.’¹²

The defining sound of Bomber Command life was not the cheerful blare of the mess gramophone but the patter of rain on a Nissen hut roof. The pervading smell was not the whiff of expensive scent but the reek of coke from a smoky stove. Opening the doors of their quarters the crews looked out not at the green, upholstered Sussex hills or the fertile fields of the Weald but the vast skies and watery steppes of Lincolnshire.

Fighter pilots went to the pub by car. Bomber Boys travelled by bike or bus. They drank flat, weak beer in drab pubs and dance-halls where they competed for the favours of young women war-workers. Sex was in the air but when it took place it was often urgent and utilitarian. What they really wanted was love and it flared up often, as fierce and incandescent as the pyrotechnics that marked the targets they bombed. Sometimes it was just as ephemeral.

But once on ‘ops’, the world of lovers, friends and families beyond the base dwindled and faded, to be replaced by a different reality. The future stretched no further than the next few hours. Life was reversed. Night became day and day became night, the time when the crews went to work. Then, to each crew member the only people who mattered were those around him. There were only seven people in existence and the universe had shrunk to the size of a bomber plane.

1 Learning the Hard Way

On the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939, at bases all over Britain, ground and air crews stood by for the announcement that after many false alarms they were finally to be launched into battle. At Scampton, ‘Sunny Scampton’ as it was wryly nicknamed on account of the usually dismal Lincolnshire weather, the men of ‘A’ Flight, 89 Squadron, were smoking and chatting in the flight commander’s office while they waited for the prime minister to speak on the radio. At 11 a.m. the talking stopped and the room filled with the low, apprehensive voice of Neville Chamberlain telling them that, as of that moment, a state of war existed between Britain and Germany.

Until then, the flight commander, Anthony Bridgman, had been a study in unconcern. Now he took his feet from his desk, exhaled a slow stream of cigarette smoke and spoke, ‘quietly and rather strangely’ according to one who was present, to his men. ‘Well boys, this is it,’ he said. ‘You had better all pop out and test your aeroplanes … there will probably be a job for you to do.’

There was. In the early afternoon they were called to the lecture room where the squadron’s CO, Leonard Snaith, a distinguished pilot whose gentle manner set him apart from the boisterous, public-school ethos of the pre-war RAF, announced ‘we are off on a raid’. The targets were German pocket battleships, believed to be lying in Wilhelmshaven harbour, the great heart-shaped North Sea inlet. Their orders were to bomb them. If the ships could not be found, they were allowed to attack an ammunition depot on the land. The six crews detailed to the task were warned that ‘on no account’ were they to hit civilian establishments, either houses or dockyards, and that ‘serious repercussions’ would follow if they did so.

They surged to the crew room to climb into their kit and wait for a lorry to take them to the aircraft. They were flying in Hampdens, up-to-date, twin-engined monoplane medium bombers with a good range and a respectable bomb-carrying capacity. They had a bulbous but narrow front fuselage, only three feet wide, and a slender tail that gave them an odd, insect look. It was cramped for the four men inside, but the speed and handling made up for it.

Before they could leave, news came through that the initial take-off time of 15.30 had been put back. The men lay outside on the grass, smoking and thinking about what lay ahead. Another message arrived saying there had been a further delay, provoking a chorus of swearing. By now everyone’s nerves were fizzing. One pilot, despite a reputation for cockiness, found his ‘hands were shaking so much that I could not hold them still. All the time we wanted to rush off to the lavatory. Most of us went four times an hour.’

At last the time came to board the lorry and just after 6 p.m. the engines rumbled into life and the Hampdens bumped down the runway. For all their training, few of the pilots had ever taken off with a full bomb load before. The aircraft felt very heavy with the 2,000 pounds of extra weight but they lumbered into the air without mishap and set course over the soaring towers of Lincoln cathedral, over the broad fields and glinting fens and rivers of Lincolnshire, and out across the corrugated eternity of the North Sea for Germany.

As they approached Wilhelmshaven, the weather went from poor to atrocious. The gap between the grey waves and the wet cloud narrowed from 300 to 100 feet. Gun flashes could be seen through the murk but there was no telling where they came from.

Eventually, Squadron Leader Snaith’s aircraft swung away to the left. The appalling conditions and the impossibility of knowing precisely where they were had persuaded him there was no point in carrying on. The initial disappointment of one pilot gave way to the realization that Snaith was right. ‘For all we knew,’ he wrote, ‘we were miles off our course. The gun flashes ahead might have been the Dutch Islands or they might have been Heligoland.’

They dumped their bombs into the sea and headed for home. By the time they crossed the coast at Boston it was dark. Most of the crews had little experience of night flying and one got hopelessly lost. Luckily, the moon picked up a landmark canal and they followed it back to Scampton, landing tired, and rather disillusioned, at 10.30 p.m. ‘What an abortive show!’ wrote the captain of the errant aircraft. ‘What a complete mess-up! For all the danger we went through it couldn’t be called a raid, but nevertheless we went through all the feelings.’¹

But at least everyone had got back alive. If Bomber Command’s first offensive operation was a disappointment, the second was a disaster. On 4 September more attacks were launched against German warships off Wilhelmshaven and further north, at Brunsbüttel, in the mouth of the Kiel Canal. A force of fourteen Wellingtons and fifteen Blenheims set off. The weather was dreadful. Ten aircraft failed to find the target. The Blenheims managed to reach the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the cruiser Emden at Wilhelmshaven. They even landed three bombs on the Scheer. The bombs failed to explode. The Emden was damaged when a stricken bomber crashed on to it. But five of the attacking aircraft were destroyed, most by flak from the fleet’s anti-aircraft guns.

Some of the Wellingtons claimed to have located targets to bomb at Brunsbüttel but if they did they caused them little harm. Four aircraft were shot down by German fighters. A gross navigational error meant that two bombs were dropped on the Danish town of Esbjerg, 110 miles to the north, killing two innocents. The day’s efforts had achieved nothing and resulted in the loss of nearly a quarter of the aircraft dispatched.

These initial efforts displayed many of the myriad weaknesses of Bomber Command as it set out to justify the extraordinary claims that had been made in its name in the years between the wars. The operations were based on sketchy intelligence and preceded by only the most perfunctory of briefings. The aircraft were the best the RAF could offer but the navigation equipment available to guide them to their targets was primitive, and some of the bombs they dropped were duds. The training the crews had received, long and arduous though it had been, had still not properly prepared them for the job. And the tactics they were following were clearly suspect, given the losses that had been sustained.

On the other hand, the episode did provide a demonstration of the potential of Bomber Command’s underlying strength. The crews had shown a powerful ‘press on’ spirit, with fatal results in the case of most of those trapped in the seven aircraft that went down. Despite the paltry results, nothing could be inferred about the quality of the airmen. The man whose memoirs provide the basis for the account of the first raid, the pilot of the Hampden who got lost, was the twenty-year-old Guy Gibson, who three and a half years later was to lead the triumphant Dams Raid. At the time, though, these first operations served mainly to expose the RAF’s weakness and to reveal the huge gap between what a bomber force was supposed to do and what it could in fact achieve.

In their short life, bombers had gained an awesome reputation for potential destructiveness. The prospect of unrestricted air warfare tinged the mood of the interwar world with quiet dread. It cast the same shadow of fear and uncertainty over life as the thought of nuclear holocaust did in the post-war years. The sense of doom was fed by a tide of alarming articles and books.

A novel, 1944, published in 1926 was typical of the genre. The fact that its author, the Earl of Halsbury, had served on the Air Staff’s Directorate of Flying Operations in the First World War appeared to lend particular weight to its arguments. The tale was told in the brusque, conventional prose of contemporary thrillers, but the message was revolutionary. Its hero, Sir John Blundell MP, is regarded by his colleagues as a crackpot for his insistence that another world war is inevitable. The next conflict, he believes, will bring about ‘the total obliteration of civilization not more nor less. Total obliteration, phutt, like a candle.’

He warns anyone who will listen that in ‘not more than twenty years’ fleets of bombers will be roaming the skies of Europe, dropping poison gas. The country’s air defences will prove useless. The government will be paralysed. Lacking leadership or a militaristic tradition to maintain discipline, people will turn on each other. When the first raid occurs, Sir John’s son Dick is sitting down to dinner at the Ritz with his girlfriend Sylvie. ‘Above the night noises of a great town could be heard the faint but unmistakeable hum of aeroplanes. Presently they became louder and there was an uncomfortable hush throughout the restaurant. To Dick … the noise seemed to be coming from everywhere. Trained to appreciate such things, he knew there must be an immense number of machines. Somewhere to the south came the sound of a futile anti-aircraft battery … like a swarm of locusts a mass of aeroplanes was just discernible, lit up by the searchlights, as yet mere specks in the sky. More anti-aircraft guns were heard coming into action, somewhere down the river. Bursting shells winked like fireflies in a tropical forest … the raiders were through and over London … they had easily broken through the carefully-prepared but utterly inadequate defence that met them.’²

Dick and Sylvie manage to escape the capital. On their way westwards they see anarchy and cruelty everywhere. A band of proletarian refugees from Plymouth turn cannibal, preying on stragglers who stray near their Dartmoor hideout. Almost everyone behaves badly. In a country mansion, upper-class loafers meet death in a last orgy of drink and drugs. At one point the pair run into a crowd of scavengers. ‘[It] was not made up of the English [Dick] had known. They were a new race, a hard, grim, cruel race, changed completely by days of want, total lack of discipline and above all by the complete dissolution of the bonds which knitted their civilization into a kindly, altruistic society.’

Halsbury was serious. He claimed his assertions were based on current scientific fact.³ Official projections of what unrestricted air war might mean were scarcely less alarming than his lordship’s imaginings. They took as their starting point the results of German air raids on Britain in the Great War, which started with Zeppelin attacks in January 1915 and continued with raids by Gotha and Giant bombers. Altogether, they killed 1,413 people and injured 3,407. The great majority of the casualties were civilians. From this data it was calculated there would be fifty casualties for every ton of bombs dropped. In 1937 the Committee of Imperial Defence, which brought together the country’s most senior airmen, soldiers, sailors and bureaucrats, was informed by its experts that the Germans had the means to maintain an all-out air assault on Britain for sixty days. This would result in the deaths of up to 600,000 people and serious injury to 1.2 million.

A year later the Ministry of Health estimated that between 1 million and 2.8 million hospital beds would be needed to deal with casualties. The huge numbers of dead would have to be interred in mass graves. In April 1939 a million burial forms were sent out to local councils.

Like Halsbury, the government also assumed that the public’s nerve would fail. The scattered bombing of the previous war had produced flickers of panic and despondency. Concentrated attacks were expected to trigger widespread hysteria. A report to the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1931 proposed throwing a police cordon around London to prevent a mass exodus and discussions began in 1937 to recruit 20,000 reserve constables to keep order in the capital. It was thought that the first duty of the army, should Germany attack, was to ‘maintain confidence, law and order among our civil population before attempting to fulfil any other role’. In the spring of 1939 the War Office warned army commanders of the sort of work their men might be expected to carry out. In one scenario, ‘crowds without food have taken refuge in the open land in the suburbs. Civil authorities have organized soup kitchens which are being rushed by hungry people. Troops are required to restore order and organize queues.’

It was suggested that psychiatric casualties might outstrip physical casualties by three to one. In 1938 a committee was formed of senior psychiatrists from the London teaching hospitals and clinics to plan wartime mental health requirements. Its report to the Health Ministry proposed a network of centres providing immediate treatment in the bombed areas, outpatient clinics and roving teams of adult and child counsellors.

These dire predictions were a reflection of a fear that gripped everyone. ‘We had entered a period,’ Churchill wrote later, ‘when the weapon which had played a considerable part in the previous war had become obsessive in men’s minds. Ministers had to imagine the most frightful scenes of ruin and slaughter in London if we quarrelled with the German dictator.’⁴

Much of the alarm had been generated by the man who was regarded by both politicians and the public as the country’s greatest authority on air war. Hugh Trenchard had risen to be head of the Royal Air Force during the First World War. He was known as ‘Boom’ to his colleagues, a reference to his foghorn voice. They regarded him and his utterances with what now seems like extraordinary reverence. ‘What a character he is!’ declared Sir John Slessor, one of his many disciples and a wartime bomber group commander. ‘The enormous lanky figure; the absent-minded manner, shot with sudden flashes of shrewd and humorous insight; the illegible handwriting; the inarticulate speech – always a lap or two behind his racing brain; his wonderful capacity for getting people’s names mixed up. Boom was a constant source of joy to those who were lucky enough to serve under him.’⁵

Lord Trenchard, as he became, was forceful and confident and contemptuous of ideas that were not his own. He had been head of the first separate bombing force, created in 1918 to repay the Germans for having bombed England. He had started out, though, as a doubter, sceptical of what aircraft could achieve on their own. His conversion to the value of strategic bombing, when it came, was absolute. Through the Twenties and Thirties he became the foremost advocate of using aeroplanes to smash the enemy into submission on their own territory. He was to exercise a powerful influence over RAF and government policy right into the early years of the war, with dogmatic assertions which were seldom backed up by data.

An early and often-repeated dictum was that ‘the moral effect of bombing industrial towns may be great, even if the material effect is, in fact, small.’ Later he refined this into the doctrine that ‘the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of 20 to 1’, an observation that had no basis in measurable fact. After the slaughter of 1914–18, the prospect of any war, let alone one that promised annihilation of civilians from the air, was horrifying to governments and populations alike. In the pre-Hitler years there were several international attempts to outlaw the bomber: at Washington in 1922, The Hague in 1923 and Geneva in 1932. They all ended in failure, undermined by pessimism, cynicism and the impossibility of uninventing the machine that defined the century.

Britain had been at the forefront of attempts to ban the bomber and had held back from spending on the development and production of bomber aircraft in the hope that they would not be needed. The rapid rearmament of Nazi Germany after Hitler’s victory in 1933 forced the abandonment of this policy and the start of a scramble for military parity.

The hope was that a sizeable bomber fleet might deter a German attack. If not, it would provide the means, and given Britain’s geographical position and dearth of soldiers, the sole means of striking back if Germany dared to attempt an aerial ‘knock-out blow’ at the start of hostilities.

By the end of the First World War, Britain was already committed to a policy of strategic bombing. The main work of the air force between 1914 and 1918 had been tactical: to support the army, flying reconnaissance missions, spotting the fall of artillery shells and attacking German soldiers in the field. Later, bigger aeroplanes and heavier bomb loads raised the possibility that the air force could play a strategic role in defeating the enemy, by attacking the factories and foundries and power plants that turned the engines of modern industrial war.

The possession of a long-range bombing fleet suited British needs. A Continental power like Nazi Germany saw aeroplanes largely as an adjunct to its land forces who would carry out the main work of conquest. This was reflected in its choice of versatile, medium-sized aircraft which could blaze a trail of destruction to clear the path for its advancing armies, as well as carrying out conventional bombing.

Britain’s case was very different. It had no plans to invade anyone and saw air power chiefly as a means of defence – but a defence founded on aggression. Trenchard had stimulated the offensive spirit among his pilots on the Western Front, rarely flinching from the losses that that policy inevitably entailed.

Some in the RAF argued that Germany could be defeated by bombing alone. That was always an extreme view. However everyone, including the chiefs of the other services, agreed that the air force had a major role to play in destroying Germany’s war industry, demoralizing its population, and preparing the ground for the army to finish the job.

This was the essence of strategic bombing, and in the interwar years it was the RAF’s ability to wage a strategic bombing campaign that provided the chief justification for its existence. Everything was geared to attack, with only minor consideration given to the defensive role of aircraft. Bombers outnumbered fighters by about two to one through the period. There was a brief, fortuitous diversion from this path in 1937 when the Air Staff was forced to accept the argument of Sir Thomas Inskip, brought in as Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, that Britain needed a strengthened fighter force to ward off the immediate threat from the German air force. But the RAF’s resultant triumph in the summer of 1940, when the Battle of Britain swirled in the sky over southern England, did nothing to subvert the doctrinal orthodoxy that it was attacks that won wars.

Despite this preoccupation, the RAF started the war with a bomber fleet that was totally inadequate to carry out its own stated aims. The machines of the early Thirties were ungainly and saddled with uninspiring names. The Boulton Paul Overstrand, the Fairey Hendon and the Handley Page Harrow did not sound likely to strike fear into the enemy. They were stop-gaps, filling the ranks until the arrival of the new generation of aircraft. The programme to re-equip with giant, four-engined aircraft, which eventually produced the Stirling, Halifax and Lancaster, was launched in 1936, but it took until 1942 for them to start arriving on the squadrons. Bomber Command’s heaviest bombers at the start of the war were two-engined Wellingtons, Hampdens and Whitleys, which were reasonably advanced for the time but plainly insufficient for the task that the air force had set itself.

The RAF’s blueprint for waging war was contained in the Western Air Plans, first drawn up in 1936. They rested on the belief that bombers could find and destroy the factories, oil installations, roads and railways that were the object of a strategic force’s attentions. This was to turn out to be a hugely mistaken assumption.

The plans supposed that Germany would start the war either by attacking Belgium and France or by launching an all-out bombing campaign on Britain. In the first case, Bomber Command was to attempt to slow down the advance of the German army by striking its supply lines. In the second, it was to reduce the power of the Luftwaffe assault by attacking aerodromes and other aviation targets. At the same time, the Air Staff who directed the command’s efforts were also eager to disrupt the enemy’s supply of oil. The dream of bringing the German military to a halt by starving it of fuel would persist to the last days of the war.

In the event the Germans took their time digesting their prey before raising their eyes hungrily westwards. Britain did little to provoke them. Until the invasion of Norway in April 1940, the RAF confined itself to intermittent raids on shipping and leaflet-dropping sorties over Germany and the conquered territories. This was partly a reflection of the scrupulousness that was Britain’s official policy. Thirty months before the start of the war Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced to the House of Commons that Britain would only bomb purely military objectives and take every measure to avoid civilian casualties. A few days after it began, the RAF’s Director of Plans, Air Commodore Sir John Slessor, promised that ‘indiscriminate attack on civilian populations as such will never form part of our policy’.

But the caution was also a reflection of reality. The air force was weak and inadequately equipped and in no position to risk its men and machines unnecessarily. The phoney war period provided Bomber Command with a desperately needed space in which to measure its capabilities and build up its strength. The propaganda leaflet drops, which look faintly ludicrous to modern eyes, may have done little to subvert the Nazi regime but they served another useful purpose. They provided crews with crucial experience of night flying over enemy territory, at very little cost.

Night flying, it was to turn out, was a vital skill. The first lesson the RAF learned when tested by wartime conditions was a painful one. The prevailing wisdom was that bombers, if they held to a tight formation, could defend themselves in daylight from attack by German fighters. So great was the faith in this belief that only five of the thirty-three operational squadrons had received any training in flying in the dark.

The theory was thrown into doubt from the beginning. German fighters, directed by radar, savaged the bombers sent off on shipping searches over the North Sea. In two attacks on 14 and 18 December, half of the thirty-four Wellingtons dispatched were destroyed. The myth of the self-defending daylight bombing formation lingered on until the spring when it was demolished by another punishing encounter with reality. Following the German invasion of Norway and Denmark in early April 1940, Bomber Command was ordered to disrupt the advance. On 12 April, nine Hampdens and Wellingtons out of a force of sixty were shot down by fighters while trying to bomb shipping in the Stavanger area. It was the last appearance of the two types in daylight operations. Henceforth bombing at night-time would become the norm for these aircraft and the heavier ones that succeeded them.

Britain held back from launching attacks near population centres for as long as it could. With the German invasion of the Low Countries on 10 May 1940 and the Battle of France that followed, restraint was gradually abandoned. Everyone knew that sooner or later civilians would be killed. The only question was how many. In the early months of the war the Germans had been as anxious as the British not to take innocent lives, fearing it would provoke a retaliation that would make the negotiated settlement that Hitler desired more difficult. But it had happened nonetheless.

At dusk on 16 March 1940, at the hour the locals call the ‘grimling’, a 27-year-old Orkney Islands farmer called James Isbister heard the sound of aircraft. He left his wife and three-month-old son and went to his cottage door to look. Silhouetted against the northern sky were the broad wings and slender bodies of a fleet of four Heinkel bombers. They seemed to be heading for Scapa Flow, a sheet of sheltered sea, surrounded by low hills, where warships of the British fleet were anchored. As the aircraft closed on the fleet other shapes appeared in the sky. A cluster of small, dartlike machines hovered above the bombers before swooping down among them. What looked like blue electric sparks glittered from under their wings and stitched across the sky. The RAF had arrived. The German formation that had looked so sure of itself held firm for a moment, then wavered and broke. The bombers lunged in all directions, desperate to shed their loads and head for home. One came directly towards Mr Isbister. It flew very low, near enough for him to have been able to notice the camouflage of the fuselage, grey-green like the scales of a pike, and its pale belly and glass snout. On the underside, where the wings met the body, were two cross-hatched panels. They swung open and dark shapes tumbled out. The bombs fell in a stick, sending up fountains of dirt. The shrapnel left a pretty starburst shape in the turf. James Isbister was caught in the blast and earned the sad distinction of becoming the first civilian to be killed by Germans in the British Isles in the Second World War. The following day the people from round about went to survey the damage. Among them was the poet George Mackay Brown. ‘We felt then a quickening of the blood, a wonderment and excitement touched by fear,’ he remembered. ‘The war was real right enough and it had come to us.’⁶

When the German army began its great surge westwards, the RAF at last moved to put its war plans into action. Bomber Command had been engaged from the beginning in trying to stem the flow of armour as it flooded into Belgium, Holland and France, bombing bridges and communications and suffering terrible punishment from mobile flak batteries and fighters in the process.

Initially raids were restricted to targets west of the Rhine. On the night of 11/12 May, an attack was launched on Mönchengladbach, the first on a German town. The thirty-seven aircraft that took part were aiming for road and rail junctions but bombs fell among houses and blocks of flats. They killed three Germans: Carl Lichtschlag, sixty-two, Erika Müllers, twenty-two, and a two-year-old girl called Ingeborg Schley. The dead also included a British citizen. Ella Ida Clegg had been born fifty-three years before to a British father who left Oldham to work as a factory foreman in the Rhineland. Nothing else is known about her. She was listed in official records simply as a ‘volunteer’.⁷ She will be remembered only as one of the first batch of civilians to die in the air war in Germany. These first corpses had names, but that did not last long. Such tragedies soon became commonplace as aerial war dragged ordinary people on to the battlefield and names gave way to numbers.

Four days later Bomber Command visited for the first time a target to which it would return over and over again in the years ahead. Nearly a hundred aircraft set off to attack sixteen different oil and rail targets in the Ruhr, the smoky, densely-populated agglomeration of steel and coal cities clustered along the Rhine river system, which was the heart of Germany’s war industry.

It was a puny raid by the standards of what was to come, but it was later counted by Bomber Command’s official historians as the first action of the strategic air campaign. The targets included factories in Dortmund, Sterkrade, Castrop-Rauxel and Cologne. One bomb, aimed at the IG-Werk at Dormagen, landed on a farm and killed Franz Romeike, a dairyman. Local rumour had it that he had switched on a light on his way to the lavatory and attracted the attention of a bomb-aimer. The story revealed an exaggerated notion of the accuracy of bombing, but an entirely realistic understanding of how randomly death could arrive in an air raid.

By attacking industry and communications, Bomber Command was fulfilling its raison d’être but the events of the rest of the summer meant it was deflected from concentrating on this activity. In July, having swallowed France, Germany turned its attention to Britain, launching the Luftwaffe across the Channel in an attempt to clear the skies for a possible invasion. Bomber Command was ordered to weaken the enemy’s air strength at its source by destroying aluminium plants, airframe factories and stores. It was also tasked with attacking airfields and sinking the barges appearing in the North Sea waterways to carry the invasion troops. On top of all this, it was expected to continue hitting oil, communications and industrial targets when it could.

The weight of Bomber Command’s duties meant there was no concentration of effort and the effects of their bombing, apart from on troop transports, were negligible. Nonetheless, throughout the summer the Air Ministry showered its commander-in-chief, Sir Charles Portal, with directives. Portal was a realist and a sceptic, whose perfect manners and quiet demeanour hid a mind that was as cool and hard as marble. It was he, as much as anyone, who led Bomber Command away from its pursuit of a precision that was, initially at least, unattainable, and towards a policy of annihilation. Portal queried, in his courteous but firm fashion, the wisdom of attacking the German aircraft industry. Many of the targets were sited in remote areas. He pointed out that ‘the very high percentage of bombs which inevitably miss the actual target will hit nothing else of importance and do no damage and the minimum amount of dislocation and disturbance will be caused by the operations as a whole.’ He also advocated that when initial targets could not be reached because of bad weather, aircraft should be free to dump bombs on alternatives, thus increasing ‘the moral effect of our operations by the alarm and disturbance created over the wider area’.

With these observations, which caused some surprise and concern at the ministry, Portal opened the way to a crucial shift in bombing policy. In his view, any damage was better than none and undermining morale, the moral effect in the language of the day, was a very important and desirable product of aerial bombardment. The Air Staff felt the need to sound a cautionary note. It felt that ‘moral effect, although an extremely important subsidiary result of air bombardment, cannot in itself be decisive’.⁸ For the time being, at least, it maintained its faith in what it believed were selective, precise attacks.

Portal was being indiscreet in advocating so frankly the spreading of panic. But he was stating a belief that had been accepted inside the air force from the earliest days. Despite undertaking that the RAF would not attack the civilian population as such, it was understood that any attack on land-based strategic targets would result in civilians dying. Trenchard’s independent force had killed 746 innocent Germans in the 242 raids it mounted in the six months of its existence.

Few moral contortions were necessary to justify certain civilian deaths. Many took the view that the factory worker manufacturing shells was as lawful a target as the artilleryman firing them. The killing of women and children naturally caused revulsion. But at the same time it was widely accepted that all bloodshed, or the threat of it, had beneficial results in lowering enemy spirits and undermining the will to sustain the war effort. This was no more than a reflection of Trenchard’s dictum that the moral effect of bombing was twenty times that of the material effect. The question was, as the Air Ministry reply made clear, whether the issue of morale could be decisive. And if it could, should morale itself be a primary target of strategic bombing?

The first reports filtering out of Germany suggested that this might be the case. Germans had been led to believe that they would be largely untroubled by air attack, and very well protected if any should occur. The thin evidence available, from neutral journalists and diplomats and a handful of spies, spoke of shock and dismay among ordinary citizens that the war had entered their towns.

Meagre though this testimony was, it reinforced the conviction in some quarters that German nerves were weaker than those of the British. This was Trenchard’s belief. It was not Churchill’s, who in October 1917, when calls for revenge for the German air raids were at their loudest, had dismissed the idea that a response in kind could produce a German surrender. ‘Nothing that we have learned of the capacity of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods,’ he wrote.⁹

Even if the Germans’ pluck was suspect, it was questionable whether this would produce any immediate advantage for Britain and its allies. An influential subcommittee reporting to the Chiefs of Staff had pointed out with some understatement three years before the outbreak of war that ‘a military dictatorship is likely to be less susceptible to popular outcry than a democratic government’.¹⁰ This was only common sense, but it was to be very often forgotten or ignored.

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz provided the great test of British morale. In the first two months of the air war, 1,333 people were killed as German bombs missed their targets or were scattered at random when the raiders headed for home. On the night of 24 August the first bombs fell on central London and a fortnight later it experienced its first heavy bombardment. That month 6,954 civilians were killed all over Britain, and a further 6,334 in October. This was death on a hideously larger scale than had been endured in the previous war.

In the capital, the bombs were ostensibly aimed at docks, railways and other locations with an arguable military or war-industrial value. In practice they landed everywhere. They fell on Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, Kensington Palace, Lambeth Palace and Buckingham Palace, twice. They hit hospitals and theatres, the London Zoo and Madame Tussaud’s. They crashed down on rich and poor alike, the brick terraces of the East End and the stucco squares of Kensington and Mayfair. But the great sprawl of London meant that the violence lacked concentration. As one part of the city was ‘getting it bad’ another was having a relatively quiet night. The capital adjusted quickly to death from the air. The damage was spectacular but had minimal effect on the war effort. There was little sign of the collapse of morale feared by the authorities, even though the Blitz was to continue, night after night, until the following spring.

Churchill had reacted to the first London raid by ordering an attack on Berlin. It went ahead on the night of 25 August. The city was covered with thick cloud making aiming virtually impossible. The incendiary bombs that did fall within the city limits did little damage, mostly landing harmlessly in open country. There were three further raids on Berlin in the next few days. The prime minister wanted to spread the attacks throughout Germany but faced resistance from the Air Staff who continued to argue for narrow and selective targeting.

But as the German bombardment persisted, such a detached view became untenable. As a concession to the new mood, on 21 September the Air Staff directed Portal to continue the assault on Berlin. The bombers should aim for ‘legitimate’ targets such as railways and the like. But the object was also to cause ‘the greatest possible disturbance and dislocation both to the industrial activities and to the civil population generally in the area.’¹¹

To Portal, the directive did not go nearly far enough. Ten days before he had offered a new policy to the staff, based on direct retaliation. He suggested twenty German towns should be warned by radio broadcast that each attack on a British town would be repaid by a heavy, indiscriminate attack by Bomber Command on one of their number. Alternatively, a town like Essen, the home of the arms manufacturer Krupp, which could be regarded in its entirety as a military target, could be subjected to overwhelming bombardment. Another approach was to select a military target, presumably a barracks or suchlike, for an all-out assault in ‘the knowledge that the normal spread of such a heavy attack would inevitably cause a high degree of devastation to the town.’¹²

Portal’s views, combined with those of the prime minister, forced the Air Staff planners to think again. They had stuck to their view in the belief that precision bombing was attainable and producing desirable results. They regarded the inevitable civilian deaths as incidental to the main aim of destroying strategic targets, not an end in themselves.

Portal’s position was strengthened by a German decision to raise the stakes in the air war. On the night of 14 November, a force of 449 aircraft was sent to Coventry in the Midlands. The air raid killed 554 people and seriously injured 865, almost all of them civilians. Its political impact, though, was to prove far greater than the physical damage inflicted. What happened in Coventry would shape the direction of the air war.

2 Coventrated

Coventry was an obvious and, by the standards that Britain had set itself, a legitimate target for aerial attack. Its mediaeval core and fine cathedral and churches did not alter the fact that it was an important centre of war industry, crammed with aircraft and motor-car factories and machine-tool and instrument works.

The people who worked in Coventry liked the place. Many had come from elsewhere to man the production lines and were pleasantly surprised to find themselves in a city of manageable size and that nowhere was far from open country. Rearmament had made it prosperous. By 1940 its population had grown to nearly 240,000, double what it had been thirty years before.

Even with the influx of outsiders, civic pride was strong. ‘People were self-disciplined and proudly self-reliant,’ wrote Dennis Field, a Coventry schoolboy at the time of the raid who went on to join Bomber Command. There was a marked communal loyalty summed up in the signature tune of the city’s favourite entertainer, Sydney James, who appeared every week at the Rialto. As he played the organ, the audience would sing along.

Looking at life and wearing a smile

Helping a lame dog over a stile

Don’t mind the rain

Forget your umbrella

Or lend it, for once, to the other fella

Making the best of all that you find

Leaving your cares and your worries behind

Laughing at your troubles and your trials and your strife

Yes, that is the best way of looking at life …¹

An air of complacency seems to have hung over the pleasant streets of Coventry in the early part of the war. Its politics were Labour, a consequence of the strong trade-union movement rooted in the factories. Coventry people made weapons but many were opposed to their use. Pacifism and the disarmament movement were strong. In Coventry, as elsewhere, a strange mood of insouciance, verging on fatalism, was noticeable as the violence grew nearer. When, in the spring of 1939, the authorities offered Anderson bomb shelters at a price of five pounds (free for the lower-paid) there were few takers. Those who accepted had their legs pulled for being ‘windy’.

In June 1940, when the first bombs dropped on Ansty aerodrome just outside the city, they were seen as a novelty. People set out in cars and on bicycles to gawp at the craters. The thrill soon wore off. Between 18 August and the end of October Coventry was attacked seventeen times, killing 176. As the casualty list lengthened, people started leaving the city at night, ‘trekking’ to the safety of the surrounding countryside. The better off went by car, the less affluent by bus. The very poorest piled bedding on to prams and walked out, sleeping under bridges.

By the time of the big raid people had grown accustomed to the howl of the sirens and the nuisance of shifting down to the basement or heading to the nearest public shelter. For the workers of the fire service and Air Raid Precautions, the attacks provided good practice. They had seen mutilated bodies and knew what an air raid felt like.

Despite the acknowledged threat, Coventry’s defences were weak, with only thirty-six anti-aircraft guns protecting the city. There were searchlights and fifty-six reassuring-looking barrage balloons wallowed over the city, but they were not much of a deterrent on the fatal night. RAF night-fighters found tracking intruders in the dark an almost impossible task and their success rate was to remain pitifully low until enough aircraft were fitted with radar.

A shelter-building programme had been accelerated as the raids continued and there was room inside them for most of the population but many of them were damp and cheaply built. The council’s emergency committee kept an informal log of what was being said in bus queues and pubs. The state of the shelters, the feebleness of the anti-aircraft defences and the absence of British fighters were consistent themes of complaint.²

Coventry’s transformation from an obscure Midlands city to an international symbol of civilian suffering and the inhumanity of modern war started at dusk on Thursday 14 November when crews of the Luftwaffe Pathfinder Force Kampfgruppe 100 boarded Heinkel 111s and took off from a base at Vannes, north of Saint-Nazaire. Coventry was one of three targets that night. The others were Wolverhampton and Birmingham.

The moon began to rise over Coventry at 5.18 p.m. Everyone would later recall its extraordinary brightness. It gleamed on the cobbles of the old city and the lead roof of the cathedral. The sight made people nervous. The citizens had come to fear a bomber’s moon. At 7.10 p.m. the sirens sounded. This was early for a raid to be announced and the apprehension deepened. Ten minutes later the Germans were overhead and the bombardment began. It started with small incendiaries. They made a curious swishing noise as they fell. By now people had learned how to deal with them, picking them up with a long-handled shovel and dropping them into a bucket of water or sand.

But they came down in huge numbers and the emergency services and volunteer firewatchers were soon overwhelmed. At 9.31 p.m. the first high explosive (HE) bombs hit the ground. A firewatcher’s log recorded at 9.40 p.m.: ‘Cathedral blazing fiercely. HEs all around the city centre.’ The sirens had sent women and children hurrying out into the blacked-out streets to seek the public shelters, or down into their basements or back-garden Andersons. ‘When the sirens sounded I was doing homework in our front room,’ Dennis Field remembered. ‘The continual drone of engines and falling bombs made it quickly obvious that the raid was unusually heavy and Mum and I soon decided to go to next-door’s shelter where we had an open invitation when things looked sticky. It was cold and we took extra coats … the bombs rained down … many times we crouched down expecting the worst … occasionally there were colossal bangs and blasts which blew open the door. I wanted to go out and see what was happening and to help if I could but demurred to Mum’s pleadings and restricted myself to occasional peers outside. The sky seemed aglow with the brightest huge conflagration lighting the sky in the direction of the city centre.’

After the initial fire-raising attack lit up the city the main force of bombers converged on it in three streams, crossing the English coast at Lincolnshire, Portland and Dungeness. The raid had been planned in considerable detail. Each of the eight bomber units involved had been assigned an objective. Their targets included the Alvis aero-engine factory, the Standard Motor Company, the British Piston Ring Company, the Daimler works and the Hill Street Gasworks. The greatest destruction was done to the Daimler factory to the north of the city centre, which produced among other things rotating gun turrets. The site was struck by up to 150 HE bombs and 3,000 incendiaries. The Alvis factory was bombed flat. Altogether twenty-seven war production factories including twelve engaged in making aeroplanes were hit.

The raid reached a climax around midnight. A survivor remembered ‘a night of unforgettable horror – the scream of falling bombs – the shattering explosions – the showers of incendiaries, literally thousands, and then … perhaps the most horrifying sight of all – the sudden fires leaping up, their flames, fanned by the wind, rapidly spreading and enveloping all within reach.’³ The smell of the burning city reached up to the bombers. A crewman, Hans Fruehauf, who had taken part in the first London raids, looked down on the lake of fire and wondered what he was doing. ‘The usual cheers that greeted a direct hit stuck in our throats. The crew just gazed down at the flames in silence. Was this really a military target, we all asked ourselves?’⁴ A ‘Front Reporter’ for the German propaganda service was a passenger in one of the aircraft. He had no doubts of the legitimacy of what he witnessed. ‘We could see enormous fires raging, some white and brilliant, others dark red. Then came the high spot of the raid, the dropping of the bombs … a tremor went through the machine as the bombs dropped … our bombs had hit their mark; the fires extended … it is the nerve centre of the British armament industry which had been hit, and I am proud that I witnessed this.’⁵

The anti-aircraft guns soon ran out of ammunition and there was no sign of RAF night-fighters so the Germans were free to bomb as they pleased, swooping in low to improve accuracy. As mains were shattered and hydrants buried under rubble, the firemen’s hoses ran dry. Crews drafted in from outside watched impotently as Coventry burned. The fire was fiercest in the old city centre. John Sheldon who owned a stables in Little Park Street described the din of ‘falling walls, girders, pillars, machinery crashing four storeys, the droning of the planes as they let go their bombs and the rattling of shrapnel on corrugated sheeting’. It seemed to him that no one caught in the open could possibly have survived.⁶

The fire created weird effects. In Broadgate, in the heart of the city, the smell of roasting meat from burning butcher shops mingled with the scent of fine Havanas from the tobacconists, Salmon and Gluckstein. Inside the shelters, the air was thick with plaster and brick dust shaken loose by the pounding, and the stench of filth from the primitive or non-existent latrines. The overwhelming feeling was of powerlessness. It was better to be outside doing something. The ARP and Auxiliary Fire Service workers, the ambulancemen, doctors and nurses found they were too busy to be afraid. The urge to not let oneself down, to be seen to be coping and doing one’s best was a strong antidote to fear or at least a help in suppressing it. ‘Everyone was working as a member of a team,’ said a student nurse at Gulson Road Hospital which was inundated with casualties after the Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital suffered heavy damage. ‘Even the consultants who were normally treated like little gods and who to us poor nurses never seemed to be in the best of moods became human.’ During her training she had dreaded having to assist at an amputation and had arranged to be off duty when such operations were scheduled. ‘The blitz on Coventry changed all that for me. I didn’t have time to be squeamish.’⁷

Despite the ferocity of the attack, rescue workers struggled on. Instead of reducing the value of life, the scale of the slaughter seemed to increase it. Every death averted, every existence saved, was a small victory. The hope of preserving a life drove the rescue teams to extraordinary lengths of selflessness. Les Coleman, an air-raid warden, heard a baby crying from beneath the rubble of a demolished house. He and his mates scrabbled for hours at the pile of bricks, fearful of using picks and shovels in case they hurt the child. Overhead the Luftwaffe were busy and the bombs fell steadily. They only stopped digging when the crying faded to silence.⁸

The all-clear sounded at 6.16 p.m., eleven hours after the first warning. Few heard it. Most of the electricity cables that powered the sirens were cut. Gradually people crept from the shelters into a drizzly morning and a changed world. The first thing they did was to look for their houses. Dennis Field found his, ‘like most around, with windows out and roof damaged and clearly uninhabitable.’ At least it was still standing. Whole streets had disappeared and landmarks vanished. The town seemed to have dissolved. The survivors walked through mounds of smoking debris flickering with flame, around craters big enough to swallow a bus. The most shocking sight was the cathedral. It lay open to the sky. The roof and the pillars had collapsed and everything inside the nave had burned to ash, piled up within the sagging external walls. All that remained was the spire and tower.

Coventry had been hit by 503 tons of high explosive, 56 tons of incendiaries and 127 parachute mines. The city was like others which had expanded during the Industrial Revolution. The workers’ houses were huddled along the flanks of the factories they worked in. It was inevitable that the German bombs, no matter how well aimed, would hit them. Altogether 42,904 homes were destroyed or damaged, 56 per cent of the housing in the city. The number of dead was put at 554. Another 863 were seriously injured.

This was the most concentrated attack of the Blitz to date. To Britain and its allies it seemed that the Germans had set a new standard in ruthlessness. Those who took part in the raid believed they were engaged in a respectable act of war. At the pre-operation briefing, crews were told by their commander that Coventry was ‘one of the chief armament centres of the enemy air force and has also factories which are important for the production of motor vehicles and armoured cars.’ If the raid succeeded, he said, ‘we shall have dealt another heavy blow to Herr Churchill’s war production.’⁹

The raid was indeed a great success. Eight hours after it ended, German radio listeners were told that bombers had ‘inflicted an extraordinarily heavy blow on the enemy’ and that Coventry had been ‘completely wiped out’. In the broadcast a notorious word was heard for the first time. What the bombers had done was to koventrieren, to Coventrate, the city.¹⁰

Until now civilian spirits had held up well in air attacks. Coventry provided a new and sterner test of morale. The raids on London so far had been heavy but scattered. The attacks on places like Liverpool and Southampton had been limited and of much shorter duration. The violence against Coventry seemed more focused and therefore potentially more traumatic than anyone else had experienced. It was here that the question of whether Britain could take it might be answered.

The first evidence was troubling. As people struggled to recover, a feeling of numb hopelessness appears to have set in. By now there were reporters around to record the city’s mood. Hilde Marchant, a thoughtful and courageous Daily Express correspondent who had witnessed the war in Spain, arrived while fires still burned and buildings toppled. She came across a dazed-looking group standing helplessly in the street, ‘occasionally asking when bread was coming into the city. There was no clamour, just sullen resentment at the inconvenience. They had patience because they were too weary to be angry.’ Outside the Council House, the municipal headquarters, she saw a long queue. ‘Men without collars and still in their carpet slippers. Women in woollen dressing gowns and slippers just as they had come from the shelter … asking for food and money.’

When an aeroplane appeared overhead there was a wild scramble and women hauled their children to the nearest shelter. The aircraft shifted in the sky to reveal RAF roundels, but it was some time before anyone was persuaded to come out. Some people had never left the shelters after the all-clear. Peering into one, Marchant saw two adults and two children ‘with greenish faces, so still that they looked dead’. A team from the pioneering social study group Mass Observation, veterans of bomb attacks on London and elsewhere, arrived in Coventry on Friday afternoon less than a dozen hours after the raid finished. Their report claimed the attack had caused ‘unprecedented dislocation and depression’, compared with what they had seen before. ‘There were more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis observed than during the whole of the previous two months together in all areas,’ it said. ‘Women were seen to cry, to scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack a fireman and so on. The overwhelmingly dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness. The tremendous impact of the previous night had left people practically speechless in many cases. And it made them feel impotent. There was no role for the civilian. Ordinary people had no idea what they should do (original emphasis).’¹¹

The lack of organization or direction was unsurprising given the power of the attack. The mayor and his officials, the men who ran the city’s services, had all suffered the same experience as everyone else. An individual report by a Mass Observation representative suggested that Coventry’s relative smallness meant the ‘shock effect of the bombing was much greater than in London … everybody knew somebody who was killed or missing … everybody knew plenty of people who had been rendered temporarily or permanently homeless. And these subjects occupied literally 90 per cent of all conversation heard throughout Friday afternoon and evening. Even in Stepney at the beginning of the Blitz there was not nearly so much obsession with damage and disaster.’

This was to be expected and no indication of despair. But the observer also noted that people seemed anxious to leave Coventry behind, reporting that ‘the dislocation is so total in the town that people easily feel that the town itself is killed (original emphasis).’¹²

This was the reaction that the authorities had feared, opening the way to anarchy. It was particularly disastrous if it happened in Coventry. If the city descended into chaos and flight, who would man the war factories when they were rebuilt, as they would have to be if the struggle was to continue?

Senior government figures rushed in to test the mood themselves. The Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Health Ernest Brown and the Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook converged on Coventry. The city officials who met them were angry. They demanded to know why there had been no night-fighters to protect them and so few guns. Morrison wrote later that he found ‘an almost total lack of will or desire to get the town moving again’ and detected an ‘air of defeatism’. This was desperately unfair. The men in front of him were still in shock from an experience that was unknown to the men from London. The chief fire officer, who showed up covered in grime from the smoke, fell asleep at the table.

Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born press baron and crony of the prime minister, seemed particularly unsympathetic. Instead of offering any apology for the absence of fighters he made a florid speech, reminding the officials of their duty to get Coventry working again. This was the brutal truth. Coventry was essential to the war effort and the resumption of production was given precedence over easing the plight of survivors. The first major decision was to set up an organization under the chairmanship of a powerful local car manufacturer, William Rootes, to oversee the restoration of gas, water, electricity and transport so that the war factories could function again.

Apprehension rather than defiance was the prevailing sentiment in Coventry’s shattered streets on the morning after the Blitz. There was no reason to doubt that the Germans would be back again that night and no expectation that anyone would be able to stop them. The story went round that they had deliberately left the cathedral spire intact to provide an aiming point for the next bombardment.

As the short day wore on the city emptied. It reminded Hilde Marchant of what she had seen in Spain and Finland. ‘Yet this was worse … these people moved against a background of suburban villas, had English faces … they were our own kind.’ Both sides of the road were filled with ‘lorries, cars, handcarts and perambulators … the lorries were packed with women and children sitting on suitcases or bundles of bedding … the most pathetic of all were those who just leaned against the railings at the roadside, too exhausted to move, their luggage in heaps around them and a fretful tired child crying without temper or anger …’ Those with relations round about were hoping they would have room to take them in. Those without were looking for cheap or free lodging with strangers and often they found it. Church halls and Scout huts opened up to supplement the existing emergency centres. Some gave up looking and slept under hedges or against walls.

But over the following days, people began to drift back. Many spent the day in town then trekked back to the country in the evening. There was no real choice but to return. Coventry was where their lives were. There, they joined a significant number who had stayed put, either because their duties demanded it or out of a refusal to be driven out. The pride involved in having endured quickly asserted itself. Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of Mass Observation, arrived on Friday afternoon and found the city in low spirits. ‘It would be an insult to the people of Coventry to ballyhoo them and exaggerate their spirit,’ he said in a talk broadcast after the BBC Nine O’clock News the following night. The most common remark he had heard from people as they first surveyed the mess of their city was ‘poor old Coventry’. But by Saturday, he found the mood had changed. ‘I was out in the streets again before daylight. It was a mild clear morning and the first thing I heard was a man whistling. Soon people began crowding through the town but today they were talking, even joking about it. Instead of the despair I heard them say “we’ll recover – life will go on, we can get used to it.” People still felt pretty helpless but no longer hopeless. The frightened and nervous ones had already left. Those left behind were beginning to feel tough – just as the people of London had felt tough before them.’

A week later a visitor noticed a card in the window of a half-wrecked baby-clothes shop.¹³

BUSINESS AS USUAL

KEEP SMILING

There will always be an ENGLAND

It was the spirit of Sydney James, the Rialto troubadour.

The story of what had happened in Coventry was played down in the BBC’s first big news broadcast of the day at 8 a.m. By 1 p.m. it was being given unusually full treatment. For the first time, the Ministry of Information allowed a blitzed city other than London to be mentioned by name. This was gratifying for those who endured the raid but the official version of what had happened differed sharply from what they had experienced. According to the BBC ‘the enemy was heavily engaged by intensive anti-aircraft, which kept them at a great height and hindered accurate bombing of industrial targets.’ It did admit heavy casualties – a figure of a thousand was given – and that many buildings had been destroyed and damaged. The attack, it emphasized, was an ‘indiscriminate bombardment of the whole city’. This account was repeated in the following day’s newspapers. T. S. Steele of the Daily Telegraph described the operation as a ‘terror raid’. He accused the Germans of seeking ‘to reproduce the Spanish tragedy of Guernica on a larger scale’, a reference to the Condor Legion’s destruction of the Basque capital in 1937.

Steele repeated the line that a fierce anti-aircraft barrage had kept the raiders five miles above the city. ‘There was not even a pretence at an attempt to select military targets,’ he wrote. ‘For ten hours raider after raider flew over at an immense height and dumped bombs haphazard (sic) at the rate of nearly one a minute on the town. The result is that factories which are legitimate military targets have escaped comparatively lightly. The brunt of the destruction has fallen on shopping centres and residential areas – hotels, offices, banks, churches and – no Nazi raid is complete without this – hospitals.’

Much of the information contained in the reports came from a Ministry of Home Security communiqué. Faced with the magnitude of the raid, the government had chosen to play the story up. The wisdom of publicizing the attack was questioned at the War Cabinet meeting on Monday 19 November. The Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, had listened to Harrisson’s Saturday night talk on the BBC and felt it had ‘been a most depressing broadcast’. The prime minister disagreed. The effect of the publicity had been considerable in the United States and in Germany he said.

American correspondents indeed covered the raid in detail and seized on the city’s ordeal as a symbol of British steadfastness and Nazi barbarity. The Germans responded by claiming that 223 had been killed by the RAF during a raid on Hamburg carried out the night after the Coventry attack (the true number was in fact twenty-six who died when bombs hit the Blohm and Voss shipyard). The assumption was that transatlantic indignation at what had been done to Coventry had stung Germany into insisting that its civilians were also suffering. To one watching American, it seemed clear what was coming next. Raymond Daniell of the New York Times told his readers that people in Britain now found it difficult to escape a feeling that a ‘war of extermination is beginning. Each bomb that falls intensifies hatred and stimulates the demand for retaliation in kind.’

The note of the all-clear siren had barely faded before calls for retribution began. When King George visited the city less than two days afterwards a man in the crowd called out to him: ‘God bless you. Give them what they gave to us! We can take it.’¹⁴ The intelligence reports reaching the city’s emergency services during the raids that preceded the big attack suggested that people had thought bombing attacks would be worse than they in fact were. As a result, ‘more people than hitherto now feel that indiscriminate bombing of Berlin would be an unwise policy.’¹⁵

That attitude had now changed. Hilde Marchant had been one of the first to report the calls for revenge. She had issued one of her own. ‘The Nazis added one more word to the English language – “Coventrated”,’ she wrote. ‘Let us add one more – “Berliminated”.’ Her observations had been contradicted by Harrisson in a throw-away remark at the end of his broadcast. ‘I see some reporters stressing the fact that Coventry is clamouring for reprisals,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t borne out by my own observations … it only makes Coventry realize that this sort of thing doesn’t end the war and only makes it more bitter.’

This judgement was not supported by the findings of his own teams. A fortnight after the raid they asked people in the streets of the city what they would like the government to do. ‘Knock bloody hell out of them,’ said a forty-five-year old man, described as middle class. ‘For every one he gives us, we ought to give him twenty,’ said a sixty-year-old working-class male. Another, youngish man replied. ‘We’re fighting gangsters, so we’ve got to be gangsters ourselves. We’ve been gentlemen too long.’¹⁶

Whatever gentlemanly attitudes lingered among those making Britain’s war decisions were about to disappear for the duration of the war. It was a month before the government moved to avenge Coventry. The attack took place on the night of the 16/17 December and the target was Mannheim, an industrial town that straddles the Rhine in south central Germany. There were 134 aircraft on the raid, the biggest force to be used so far. At first sight there is nothing in the operations book or subsequent intelligence reports to suggest that the purpose of the raid was any different to many that had preceded it. The order was to attack the industrial centre of the town and the primary targets were the Mannheim Motorenwerke and naval armaments factories. The clue to the special nature of the raid lay in the bombs that the aircraft were carrying. There were a few 1,000-pound bombs and many more 500- and 250-pounders, packed with high explosive and designed to knock down walls and collapse roofs. But by far the largest number of bombs were incendiaries, weighing only four pounds each but capable when dropped in sufficient numbers, as Coventry knew all too well, of setting a city ablaze.

The raid was led by eight Wellingtons which carried nothing but incendiaries in their bomb bays, flown by the most experienced crews available. The aircraft that followed them were to use the light of the fires they started as their aiming point and in the words of Sir Richard Peirse, who succeeded Portal as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, ‘to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the centre of the town.’ It was a perfect moonlit night over Mannheim and the returning crews thought they had done well. More than half the aircraft claimed to have hit the town. Some reported later that when they flew away at 3.30 a.m., the target area was a ‘mass of fires’.

In fact the raid was only a partial success. The first Wellington ‘fire-raisers’ failed to accurately identify the centre of the city and many incendiaries fell in the suburbs which were then bombed by the following aircraft. Other bombs fell on Ludwigshafen on the western bank of the Rhine. The city authorities reported 240 buildings destroyed or damaged by incendiaries and 236 by high explosive. They included thirteen shops, a railway station, a railway office, one school and two hospitals. The total casualty list was thirty-four dead, eighty-one injured and 1,266 bombed out of their homes. Of the dead eighteen were women, two were children, thirteen were male civilians and one was a soldier.

The Cabinet had given their approval for the plan three days before. If they had hoped for destruction to match that done to Coventry the reconnaissance photographs told another story. It was a disappointment and the exercise was not repeated for some time. But it was the shape of things to come.

3 ‘To Fly and Fight’

Bomber Command was poorly equipped to face the challenges of this new and vulnerable phase of its existence. In one respect, though, it was extraordinarily rich. The quality and quantity of men available to it were the best Britain and its overseas Dominions could provide. The Bomber Boys were all volunteers and the supply of aircrew candidates never slackened, even when losses were at their most daunting.

They were an extraordinarily varied bunch. Most were British. There was a sprinkling from the diaspora of the defeated nations, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, French and Belgians, wanting their revenge on Germany. They were outnumbered by large numbers of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, the ‘colonials’ as they were mockingly but affectionately called, whose lands were not directly threatened by Nazism but who, driven by a sense of adventure or fellow-feeling for their British cousins, nonetheless offered themselves for what it was soon understood were among the most dangerous jobs in warfare.

For imaginative boys growing up in the 1930s, the prospect of going to war in an aeroplane carried an appeal that the older services could never match. Aviation was only a generation old and flying glowed with glamour and modernity. In the years before the war Peter Johnson, languishing in a hated job as a breakfast-cereal salesman, looked at this world and longed to join it. ‘I read aviation magazines,’ he wrote, ‘watched the activities at an RAF aerodrome from behind a hedge and even once penetrated into a flying club on the pretext of finding out the cost of learning to fly. That, needless to say, was well out of my income bracket but the contact with the world of flight, the romantic instructors in their ex-RFC leather coats, the hard, pretty girls with their long cigarette holders, the rich young men boasting about their adventures, fitted perfectly with my picture of a dream world to which, if I joined the Air Force, I could find a key.’¹

By the time the great wartime expansion began, the RAF’s aura of chic had faded. There was little that was dashing about Bomber Command. The new aircraft were big, blunt and utilitarian and the men who flew in them were unmistakably sons of the modern age.

The pre-war professionals were, on the whole, skilled and conscientious fliers, but they masked their seriousness behind a show of pseudo-aristocratic insouciance. The new boys were much less sophisticated. They came from all backgrounds and classes, and the prevailing ethos was democratic and popular. In their writings, in their work and play, they seem sterner, more earnest and more grown-up. The white flying-suited paladins of the RAF of the 1920s and early 1930s had joined to fly rather than to fight. The newcomers had signed up to do both.

On the outbreak of war, young men flocked to join the air force. In the initial rush, the recruiting staff were sometimes overwhelmed. Edward Johnson, who went on to fly as a bomb-aimer on the Dams Raid, was working for J. Lyons, the bakers, in Leeds when war broke out. ‘I tried very hard to join up but in the initial stages they kept sending me back because they had nowhere to send people that were volunteering … it was a case of calling regularly to see if they’d made up their minds they were going to let us join.’²

As an eighteen-year old trainee surveyor, Arthur Taylor joined the Territorial Army before the war and was called up on the day war was declared. Within a few months he was bored and responded eagerly to an official circular announcing the RAF was looking for volunteers. So too did many of his companions. ‘About twenty-two applied immediately,’ he wrote. ‘Understandably our colonel took a poor view of this and pointed out that few of us were bright enough to be accepted. The number of applications then dropped dramatically to fifteen.’³

In the month of September 1939, the Aviation Candidates Board at Cardington near Bedford interviewed 671 young men. The recruiting officers were delighted at the quality of the applicants. The board could afford to be choosy. Of the 671 who presented themselves, 102, or 15.2 per cent, were rejected.

The surplus of suitable manpower persisted throughout the war. In the first quarter of 1944, when Bomber Command was suffering terrible losses during the Battle of Berlin, the board still felt able to turn away 22.5 per cent of the volunteers who applied. The great majority of applicants had not waited for an official summons before stepping forward. A much smaller proportion had chosen the RAF after being called up. There were also a number seeking a transfer from the army. The general standard of education of the army candidates tended to be lower than that of the pure volunteers, the board’s head, Group Captain Vere Bettington, observed, and a higher percentage of rejections was to be expected. RAF personnel working on the ground also responded well to appeals to ‘get operational’.

At first, candidates were required to hold the School Certificate, the multi-subject examination taken by sixteen-year-olds before going on to higher education, but by August 1940 this proviso had been dropped. Nor was leaving school before the age of sixteen considered a bar. The initial test included intelligence, mathematics and general knowledge papers. But Bettington never rejected an applicant on educational grounds alone. ‘A candidate’s desire to fly and fight,’ he declared, is ‘of primary importance.’⁴

The old RAF’s sensitivity about its arriviste origins had given it a tendency to snobbery. This was dissolved in the flood of men from modest and poor homes taking up the flying duties that had formerly been the preserve of the sons of the military, clerical, medical and colonial middle classes. Harry Yates, who left school at fourteen and worked as a junior clerk in the offices of a printing company in the south Midlands, wondered as he waited for a reply from the RAF whether his lack of education would disqualify him. ‘Could it be,’ he wrote, ‘that, in reality, becoming one of these pilot types required a university education or even an old school tie? Was it the preserve of the sons of the well-to-do? But this, as I was to discover, was far from true. Terrible thing though it was, the war brought opportunity. The great British class system counted for surprisingly little. I saw nothing of it in all my RAF days.’⁵

The impulse to fly had been stimulated in many applicants by an early encounter with aeroplanes. Brian Frow went to the 1932 Hendon Air Show with a friend from his south-London prep school. ‘I was spellbound,’ he remembered. ‘A hostile fort was bombed with live missiles; balloons forming life-sized animals were chased by big game hunters in fighter aircraft and eventually shot down.’ In the school holidays he cycled to Croydon aerodrome with an aircraft recognition book in his satchel, identifying and recording everything that flew. The fact that his eldest brother, Herbert, had been killed in action flying in the First World War did not dent his enthusiasm. Herbert’s loss was commemorated by a shrine in the family home made out of the wooden propeller of his doomed aircraft.⁶

Ken Newman, another south-London boy, also made regular pilgrimages to Croydon, which was only a mile or so from his home. ‘As a boy, and like so many others of my generation, I had been fascinated by aeroplanes,’ he recalled. ‘They were seldom seen in the sky and caused open-mouthed surprise when they were … I used to go and watch, from the roof of the airport hotel next to the terminal and flight control building.’ Sometimes an hour or more would pass between the arrivals of the Imperial Airways and KLM airliners ‘but every take-off and landing was exciting, particularly when the aeroplanes came close to the hotel building.’⁷

In opting for the RAF, volunteers were exercising a choice, and choices were rare in wartime. By doing so, they avoided being drafted into a less congenial branch of the services, and in 1939, there was no more unattractive option than the army.

The young men arriving at the recruiting centres had been born during, or just after, the end of the First World War. They had heard tales of the Western Front from their fathers and male relations. Dennis Field, the Coventry boy who had witnessed the Blitz from his back-garden shelter, had an uncle who had been in the trenches. ‘His pugnacity and bitterness were apparent even to a youngster,’ he wrote. ‘My friend’s father was a signaller in France and only reluctantly talked of the moonscape devastation, or mud, barbed wire, shell holes, bodies and rats and lice and drownings in mud and filth. My youthful picture was overwhelmingly one of revulsion.’⁸

In the streets, the sight of men who had lost limbs, the wheezing and hacking of gas-damaged lungs, told young men what they could expect. Aeroplanes were intrinsically dangerous, everyone knew that. But they were also exciting. And death in an aeroplane seemed quicker and cleaner in comparison with what they would face on land.

Jim Berry, who became a Pathfinder pilot, used to look with fascination and a tremor of fear at a German bayonet which his father had brought back from the trenches. ‘[He] used to tell us stories about the first war and it sounded horrific to me,’ he said. ‘The mud and the mess. It was something we looked at with a fair amount of horror as children. I thought that’s not for me at any price. If I had been made to go I would have had to go but I thought, well, I’m going to volunteer so I volunteered and (went for) aircrew.’⁹

The RAF, as Group Captain Bettington said, was looking for people who were eager not only to fly but to fight. The First World War had generated a hatred of conflict and yearning for peace that was evident in the great popularity of the pacifist movement. Yet the hope amongst the young that they would not be called on to take part in another great war seldom hardened into a determination not to do so. Charles Patterson, born in 1920 and brought up in middle-class comfort by his mother and sister after his parents separated, found that his early childhood ‘was overshadowed by the terrible First World War and the appalling suffering and sacrifices which were implanted in me not just by my mother but by all the grown-ups with whom I came into contact.’ It was ‘something so appalling that it just could not be ever allowed to happen again, because if it did, it would be virtually the end of the world.’

He felt, nevertheless, that ‘if another war came I would inevitably have to join up as soon as it began, to try and fight. It was very firmly implanted in my mind that the greatest sacrifices in the first war had been endured by the ordinary Tommy. What I believed and was taught was that if these young, working-class boys could show such courage it made it absolutely imperative on me to not let them down, or at least make an effort to live up to what they had done should another war come.’

As the war approached Patterson considered his choices. It was quite simple really. ‘I could never have stood up to the rigours of fighting on land and in dust and heat and dirt and so on. That simply would have been quite beyond me.’ He knew something about flying from his brother-in-law, an RAF pilot who had taken him up in a Gypsy Moth when he was ten. Like many others he had seen Dawn Patrol, a remarkably bleak and unidealized story of First World War aviators which nonetheless pushed many adolescent boys into the arms of the RAF. ‘[It] had a tremendous influence on me. It struck me that although the casualties were very heavy it was much the most exciting and wonderful way to go to war.’¹⁰

The decision to fight was made easier by the seeming inevitability of the conflict. The Germans had left Britain with no choice. To the older airmen, this came as no surprise. Peter Johnson, who was nearly five when the first war broke out and whose naval officer father was killed in 1914, felt that ‘mass hatred … was inoculated into my generation against the Germans’.¹¹ He was at least ten years older than most of his comrades in Bomber Command. The writings and recollections of the younger men do not reveal much evidence of instinctive loathing for the Hun.

A surprising number of them had some direct or indirect contact with events in Germany. When he was about fourteen, Ken Newman made friends with a German boy called Erich Strauss who had come from Stuttgart to visit his grandmother. ‘It was during one of our walks around Mitcham Common that he told me he and his family were Jewish and that the Jews in Germany were being given a very hard time by the Nazis,’ he wrote. ‘I was not quite sure whether he was telling the truth or was exaggerating to impress me.’ In 1938 he visited Germany with a school party, travelling by boat and train to Cologne then sailing up the Rhine to Mainz, staying in youth hostels along the way. ‘In every one were parties of Hitler Youth who marched about in military-style uniforms, and every morning and evening attended a flag raising or lowering ceremony with arms raised and shouts of “Heil Hitler!”’ Even so, they seemed friendly enough to the English visitors. Every young person he met ‘repeated again and again that the last thing they wanted was another war with Britain and France.’ ¹²

Informal attempts had been made to forge friendly links with Germany in the years between the wars through school trips and exchanges. Sometimes they were too successful. In the spring of 1936 thirteen-year-old Ken Goodchild went on a visit with some schoolmates from No. 6 Central School in Morden, Surrey. They were in the Rhineland when the Germany army marched in, and visited Cologne, which he was to pass through seven years later as a prisoner. On their return their families were surprised to see they were wearing swastika lapel badges. In 1937 Ken went again and was present in Düsseldorf when Hitler arrived to open an exhibition. The Führer exchanged some friendly words with the master accompanying the boys and patted some of them on the head. Goodchild was perhaps the only Bomber Command airman to have stared the enemy leader in the face.¹³

In the same year, Leonard Cheshire, a restless, rather wayward eighteen-year-old, who had just left Stowe public school, went to stay with a German family in Potsdam before he went up to Oxford. The head of the household was a retired admiral called Ludwig von Reuter. He was not a supporter of the Nazis but shared some of their opinions, telling Cheshire that 95 per cent of humanity were worthless and war was a valuable means of keeping them down. Cheshire went on to become one of the most dedicated and ruthless pilots in Bomber Command.¹⁴

Before the war it was still possible to differentiate between Nazis and ‘decent’ Germans. ‘How I loathed the Nazis,’ wrote Guy Gibson. ‘How could the common people of Germany allow such a world-conquering crowd of gangsters to get into power and stay in power? Ruthless and swaggering, domineering brutality, that was their creed.’ His anger was directed with almost equal vigour against British politicians, the ‘rotten Governments, the Yes men and the appeasers’ as well as those who voted for them.

Gibson blamed the older generation for allowing another war to happen. But he was also concerned about the willingness of his contemporaries to fight it. On 1 September 1939, having been called back from leave to rejoin his squadron, he passed through Oxford with his friend Freddy Bilbey who had been studying biology there. After a lengthy session in a pub they went to have dinner. ‘It was fairly late and we were pretty hungry, and fed like kings with some excellent 1928 burgundy, but what a rotten crowd to be seen at that place – drunken, long-haired, pansy-looking youths, mixed with foppish women. They so disgusted me that I asked Freddy if they were undergraduates … “Good Lord, no!” he said. “They are the types who try to look like undergraduates.”’¹⁵

Gibson’s doubts about some ‘varsity men may have stemmed from the Oxford Union debate of a few years before in which the motion that the house would not fight for King and Country had been carried. The event had been treated as if it was a genuine barometer of young, privileged opinion. It turned out to be utterly misleading.

Robert Kee, a handsome, rather bohemian history undergraduate, might possibly have attracted a suspicious glare from Gibson had he encountered him in an Oxford pub. But Kee was as contemptuous as Gibson was of the appeasers and as eager to get to grips with the Nazis. ‘At the time of Munich all of us at Oxford hated what was going on,’ he said. ‘We all thought [the politicians] were doing exactly what the Nazis wanted them to.’ He was in France with his tutor A. J. P. Taylor when war was declared and rushed back to sign up for the RAF.¹⁶

Whatever subtleties of feeling might have existed towards the Germans in 1939 faded with the end of the phoney war, and they became, simply, the enemy. Soon they were all too visible, in the skies over Britain. The Battle of Britain provided the most effective recruiting sergeant the RAF could have hoped for. Michael Beetham was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy in the summer of 1940. At the start of the holidays he went to stay with his father, a company commander with the York and Lancaster Regiment then based on the hills just outside Portsmouth at Hillsea barracks. ‘It was a lovely summer and the Battle of Britain was just beginning with the German bombers bombing Portsmouth naval base,’ he said. ‘God, it was spectacular. We went outside and saw the bombers going in and the Hurricanes and Spitfires diving in and having a go at them. I said to my father, that’s what I want to do. He obviously wanted me to join the army. I couldn’t put my name down until I was eighteen but I did it as soon as I could. I joined the air force to be a pilot. I’d never flown in my life but I wanted to do what those chaps were doing.’¹⁷ At the same time Edward Hearn, a young estate manager, was watching dogfights in the skies over his home in Folkestone, Kent. ‘I thought at that time that if I’ve got to go to war then I’ll go in an aircraft.’ He decided to keep his decision from his parents in order not to add to their burden of worry. All his siblings were in the process of joining up. He signed on in Maidstone. ‘When I got back my mother said why aren’t you at work? I told her, and she said well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.’ Eddie ended up a member of the crew of Michael Beetham, 50 Squadron’s bombing leader.

Bruce Lewis was standing with his friends outside the tuck shop during mid-morning break at Dauntsey’s School in Wiltshire when ‘we heard the grinding growl of unsynchronized German aero-engines … the Battle of Britain was at its height and schoolboys knew all about these technical matters. The twin-engine Luftwaffe bomber flew low over the school, and then, thrill of thrills, came the shapely little Spitfire in hot pursuit, the distinctive whistle from its Merlin engine sounding almost like the wind itself.’ Later they heard the bomber had been shot down. Amazingly, the victorious fighter pilot was an old boy of the school, Eric Marrs, who destroyed six German aircraft before being killed the following year.

At that moment Lewis jilted the Royal Navy, his first preference, and chose the RAF. It was two years before he could join up. He had a talent for drama and got a job as a radio actor with the BBC. His father, a professor who had been badly wounded at the Somme, wanted him to go to university which would gain him exemption from war service for three years. To Bruce, ‘such an existence would have been impossible – to sit studying in complete safety while others of my age were dying for their country was not on.’ ¹⁸

The start of the Blitz reinforced the realization that the air was now a crucial battlefield as well as the belief that it was in the sky that the war would be decided. Bill Farquharson, who had been raised in Malaya where his father was in the colonial service and was awaiting call-up, was serving with Air Raid Precautions in Birmingham when he was ordered to rush to Coventry to help out after the raid. The experience made him ‘angry and yet dead scared’. He felt no particular desire for revenge. He had already made up his mind to go into the air force and the experience ‘confirmed the fact that I preferred to be up [in the air] rather than down there’.¹⁹

Len Sumpter, a Corby steelworker and former Grenadier who had been recalled to the colours at the start of the war, was training recruits at the Guards Caterham depot when it was hit by German bombs. ‘We took a real hammering,’ he said. ‘A lot of people were killed there.’ When advertisements appeared calling for volunteers for aircrew he applied, impelled by the thought of ‘a little bit of excitement’ and ‘a bit of personal anger’.²⁰

Britain’s vulnerability was brought home to Ken Newman when in August 1940, a month after his eighteenth birthday, he watched Croydon airport being attacked by waves of Stuka dive-bombers. When the Blitz began he made his way each day from his home in Norbury to the City where he worked in the accounts department of a mortgage company. One Sunday night in October, the sirens sounded and he hurried his parents to their air-raid shelter. He was ‘just closing the door when I heard bombs screaming down towards us. There was no mistaking they were about to hit us or fall very close indeed and I must admit that I was very frightened and thought our end had come. Crump went the first bomb, quite near … accompanied by the sound of splintering wood, smashing glass and falling masonry …’ So it went on. When quietness returned he opened the shelter door. The air was swirling with brick dust and the house was gone. There was ‘no sleep for us at all that night. My mother was weeping in a corner of the shelter, partly over the loss of her much-loved home and also in relief that we had survived.’ Later, when asked for his reasons for wanting to join the RAF he told the chairman of the selection board that he was ‘keen to become a bomber pilot in order to have my revenge’.²¹

Those who had already joined up were glad they had done so when they heard the news from home. Doug Mourton, a wallpaper salesman before the war, was undergoing his RAF training at Abingdon when on 17 September his mother wrote to him from south London. ‘Things are very uncomfortable here at present but we are getting used to it … they don’t give us five minutes’ peace. [Aunt] Beat’s house was bombed and they have come to live with us. There [are] fourteen of us living in the cellar …’ ²²

The recruits went off to war in a spirit of optimism. Joining up dispelled the feeling of impotence that aerial bombardment generated and the air force provided the most immediate means of hitting back. There were some restless spirits who welcomed the excitement and openings that war has always offered.

When the storm finally broke Leonard Cheshire was leading what would seem to many an enviable existence, studying law, none too diligently, at Oxford. He was easily bored and game for challenges, which had led him to join the University Air Squadron. His log book recording his flights paused at the end of August 1939. Under the heading WAR he wrote: ‘a heaven-sent release … a magic carpet on which to soar above the commonplace round of everyday life.’²³

By the end of 1940 every Briton was faced with an unavoidable truth. There could be no accommodation with the Nazis. If Britain was to remain Britain it would have to fight and after the fall of France the RAF was the only force in the world that was directly attacking the Germans on their own ground.

Thousands of miles away, across oceans and hemispheres, this conviction was felt almost as deeply as it was at home. Imperial attitudes and arrangements were changing. Colonies had become Dominions and were taking their first steps to independence. Yet the cultural and emotional fabric of the empire was still densely woven and strong. At the start of the war, the official instinct of Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia was to rally to Britain, even though their interests were, for the time being at least, unthreatened by Hitler’s foreseeable ambitions. They immediately offered their young men to bolster the ranks of the RAF.

Altogether 130,000 men from the Dominions served as airmen in the RAF, almost 40 per cent. One in four of the Bomber Command aircrews was from overseas and 15,661 lost their lives. Of those, 9,887 were from Canada. Canada’s cultural ties with Britain were less established than those of other Dominions. Volunteers tended to think of themselves as answering a call to fight for their own country, rather than going to the aid of a faraway mother nation. Ralph Wood came out of church in Woodstock, New Brunswick, on the morning of Sunday 11 September to find newsboys hawking special editions of the local newspaper, the Telegraph-Journal, announcing that Canada was at war with Germany. As he walked back to the home of the parents of his girlfriend Phyllis he confronted the choices before him.

I knew I had fear of being labelled [a] coward or yellow if I didn’t volunteer my services to my country. I knew also that I had fear of losing my life if I did volunteer. There was no contest. All that remained was to choose the service I would join. The Navy? No way! I’d probably be seasick before we left the harbour, let alone battling those thirty-foot waves at sea … The Army? Well according to stories of World War I, which was the only reference we had to go by, this meant mud, trenches, lice, bayonets, etc. This was definitely not my cup of tea. Air Force? This was more appealing as it presented a picture of your home base in a civilized part of the country accompanied by real beds with sheets, fairly good food, local pubs with their accompanying social life with periodic leaves to the larger centres and cities. The hour of decision was at hand but it didn’t take me an hour to decide on the Royal Canadian Air Force. Being a fatalist, I was pretty sure my number would come up, and in the air it would be swift and definite.²⁴

Wood was volunteering out of a sense of duty to Canada and it seems that, at first, he expected to be doing his fighting at home. If the discovery that he was to be sent to England caused him or his comrades any concern there is no mention of it in his frank and cheerful memoir.

Australians and New Zealanders seem to have had a more developed feeling of kinship with Britain and a stronger sense of a shared destiny. Don Charlwood was proud of his English ancestry. His great-grandfather had been a bookseller in Norwich until 1850, when he transferred the business to Melbourne. As soon as Charlwood was able, he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force, in the knowledge that it meant crossing the world to go to the rescue of a country he had never visited.

Like Charles Patterson he felt that his generation ‘never really emerged from the shadow of the shadow of the First World War … the rise of Nazism was a lengthening of the same shadow over our youth. When this threat was faced by Britain in 1939, the response in Australia was not only that we, too, must face Nazism, but that we must stand by the threatened “Homeland”.’²⁵

The Dominion airmen sometimes appeared to feel an attachment to the British Empire that was stronger than that of the British themselves. One of Bomber Command’s great leaders, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Don Bennett, raised in the Great Dividing Range town of Toowoomba in Queensland, spoke of the ‘true British, of … Australia, of Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia and the Old Country itself.’²⁶

By the end of 1940, then, the push of the war and the pull of the air was driving tens of thousands of young men towards Bomber Command. They were rich, middling and poor and they came from every corner of Britain and its empire. They were the best of their generation and they were heading for one of the worst tasks of the war.

4 Crewing Up

The process by which these disparate and largely unskilled young men were moulded into effective members of a bomber crew was one of the great achievements of the wartime RAF. It was thorough, on the whole efficient, and surprisingly imaginative, qualities which seemed quite out of keeping with the prevailing pre-war service ethos of myopia and conservatism. Noble Frankland, who had joined the University Air Squadron on going up to Oxford in 1941 and went on to join Bomber Command and co-write the official history of its war, reckoned that by the end of operational training ‘most crews [had] a reasonable basis upon which to test their fortunes and their courage.’¹ The instruction period certainly lasted long enough. Ken Newman, who volunteered in May 1941 and was selected for pilot training, did not fly his first operational mission until the spring of 1944. A gap of about two and a half years between joining up and going into battle became the norm.

The strategic air campaign was, essentially, made up as it went along. Circumstances changed rapidly in the early days and it was some time before a regularized training programme evolved. With the coming of the four-engined heavies, the Stirlings, Lancasters and Halifaxes, the system settled down to produce a continuous stream of competent and well-prepared airmen.

The long journey to an operational squadron began with a visit to the RAF local recruiting station. Applicants were given a medical, an academic test and a brief interview after which the most obviously unsuitable were weeded out. Volunteers were applying simply to join the RAF and had no idea in which branch of the service they would end up. In the early stages, many dreamed of becoming fighter pilots. But by the end of 1940 Fighter Command’s hour had passed. The air war now belonged to Bomber Command and it was there that most volunteers would be sent. Even while the Battle of Britain was at its height, Churchill told the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff that ‘the fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.’

Official propaganda emphasized their vital role. The first successful film of the war, Target for Tonight, which came out in July 1941, was a drama-documentary which used no actors, only RAF personnel who played themselves. It followed the crew of a Wellington, F for Freddie, preparing and executing a typical raid on a typical target in Germany, piloted by Charles ‘Percy’ Pickard, a blond, impassive, pipe-smoking paradigm of the pre-war RAF. The flying scenes, although spliced with authentic footage, look amateurish and unreal now and the airmen act their parts with a touching diligence but an almost total absence of technique. It was nonetheless a wild commercial success and was seen by audiences all around the free world.

Recruiting posters portrayed the crews as gallant and spirited, the natural successors to the Fighter Boys. Noble Frankland needed little convincing that Bomber Command was the place to be. ‘I thought that the defence of Great Britain was over and the next step was to smash the Germans up. I was quite keen to take part in smashing up the Germans, which I think was a fairly common sort of instinct, but I actually had an opportunity to do it.’²

As the war progressed, it became clear that bombing was drudge work, tedious and repetitive, and with the added disadvantage of being highly dangerous. Some volunteers who were chosen to fly were dismayed when they heard what it was that they would be flying. Dennis Field had done his initial instruction on single-engined Harvards and was looking forward to going on to fighters. As he moved to the next stage of his training ‘a special parade was called and the CO announced that the whole course would be trained for multi-engined aircraft and, we inferred, four-engined bombers. I felt totally deflated at the news. The very little I knew about them gave the impression that I should become a glorified bus-driver.’³

For Harry Yates, the ex-clerk who had worried that he was too humble for the RAF, distaste for the grim, mechanical nature of the work over-rode appeals to duty. In early 1943, after a spell serving as an instructor, he decided that he wanted to go to the front line of the air war. ‘My expectations were quite specific and they were high: night fighting in Mosquitoes or Beaufighters or, failing that, ground-strafing in Beaufighters. Flying a bomber didn’t figure anywhere. Indeed the whole point was to avoid it.’ The RAF’s priorities dictated otherwise and he was sent to Bomber Command.⁴

At the beginning of the war Bomber Command’s most pressing need was for pilots. As aircraft grew in size and complexity, its requirements became much broader. The bombers in service in the early period contained an assortment of crews. The Whitley and the Wellington carried five men, including two pilots. The cramped and narrow body of the Hampden held four and had room for only one pilot. All types had an observer who acted as both navigator and bomb-aimer as well as a wireless operator and one or two gunners. The observer role was eventually split into the separate categories of navigator and bomb-aimer.

In August 1940 the first of the new generation of bombers began to appear, starting with the Stirling and followed by the Halifax and then the Lancaster, which by the end of the war was flown by 75 per cent of Bomber Command squadrons. It had been decided late in 1941 that a second pilot was superfluous. He rarely gained any flying experience and was little more than a passenger. Second pilots were dropped and replaced by flight engineers, highly trained technicians who monitored the running of the aircraft during flight. This was an important decision. Pilot training took longer and cost more than the other aircrew roles. With only a single pilot needed, more aircraft could be put in the air. If the practice of using two pilots had persisted, the great raids of 1942 that announced the opening of the main offensive would not have been possible.

By spring of 1942 there were six aircrew jobs for which volunteers could be considered: pilot, navigator, engineer, bomb-aimer, wireless operator and air gunner, of which there were two. After the initial vetting stage candidates were sent to an Aircrew Selection Centre. On the first day they faced a fairly demanding set of academic tests which were marked on the spot and the failures sent home. The following morning there was a rigorous medical. To pass ‘Aircrew A1’ required a higher level of fitness than was demanded by the other services. Next came an interview, typically by a panel of three senior officers. Dennis Steiner, a confectioner’s son from Wimbledon, who passed through the Oxford selection centre in August 1941, found it ‘more of a friendly chat than an interview. I knew that I had been accepted when it was remarked that I would like flying. As I left the room one called out “good luck lad”.’⁵ Successful candidates were sworn in, issued with their RAF number and then, anti-climactically, told to go home and wait to be summoned. This period of ‘deferred service’ could last many months.

Eventually they were called to an Air Crew Reception Centre where basic training began. The newcomers marched, saluted, went on endless runs and listened to hair-raising lectures from the medical officer. These, wrote James Hampton, who was the youngest of three brothers who volunteered for aircrew and the only one to survive, warned the new arrivals, virgins almost to a man, about ‘some of the shocking and terrifying diseases that abounded and of which they had previously been unaware. These diseases had certain things in common. They could not be caught from lavatory seats and they invariably ended with General Paralysis of the Insane followed shortly by death.’⁶ Venereal diseases were a service obsession. At his training centre in Babbacombe near Torquay, Brian Frow’s sheltered, middle-class innocence was shaken by lectures given at ‘great length, complete with slides lurid enough to frighten even the bravest from casual intercourse for life.’⁷

The RAF was adapting as fast as it could, but no one had told the pre-war regular NCOs who served as drill instructors and were not about to change their rough old ways. Cyril March, who went down the pit straight from his school in Durham, was told after a wait of more than a year to report to the reception centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. The NCOs ‘let us know in no uncertain manner that we were now in the RAF. They had one thing in common. They were fatherless to a man. There was the sergeant who told me to get my hair cut twice in one day, the sergeant who said he would cure our stiff arms after various inoculations [then] gave us a scrubbing brush, a bucket and a long flight of stairs to scrub down.’⁸

Institutionalized, low-level sadism was not uncommon. Bruce Lewis, who volunteered on his eighteenth birthday, early in 1942, regretted that ‘a fine service like the Royal Air Force should have tolerated such an unworthy reception camp’ like the one he passed through at Padgate near Warrington. ‘Enthusiastic young volunteers entered this gateway to their new career only to be cursed at, degraded and insulted by the low-quality types on the permanent staff.’ He felt ‘well prepared for all this bullying nonsense having tasted the rigours of life in public school. But some of those lads were away from home for the first time. I used to feel sorry for the ones I heard sobbing in our hut at night.’⁹

After a month, cadets moved on to one of the Initial Training Wings (ITWs) which had been set up in universities and requisitioned resort hotels, where they spent six to eight weeks. There was classroom instruction in airmanship, meteorology, mathematics, Morse code and aircraft recognition. Drill and PT accounted for four hours a day of a six-day week. The courses were tough and the standards high. An 80 per cent success rate was needed to pass.

There was leave at the end of the course and a chance for the cadets to return home to show off their uniforms. Cyril March had spent the worst part of a bitter winter at Bridlington, billeted in the attic of a run-down boarding house. He set off, ‘not being sorry to leave frozen “Brid” and feeling very grand in our new uniforms with the distinctive white Air Crew Cadet flash in our hats. I got off the train in Durham to be surrounded by my young brothers and all their mates, all wanting to carry my gear. When we got on the bus to go up home they wouldn’t let me pay; I felt like a conquering hero instead of a comparative sprog.’

By the end of the ITW course the cadets had been sifted into the categories, ‘trades’ in RAF parlance, in which they would fight their war. The path to an operational squadron now diverged as trainees proceeded to specialist flying, engineering, navigation, bombing, gunnery and wireless schools. There was some room for further adjustments. Pilots ‘washed out’ in the testing conditions of ever more advanced training were often re-assigned as navigators or bomb-aimers. But most would stay in the occupation to which they had been assigned until the end.

The British climate made it one of the worst places in the world to train airmen. In another act of surprising foresight, the Air Ministry had come to an agreement with the Dominions to make use of the blue skies they possessed in abundance. The result was the Empire Air Training Scheme which began operating in April 1940. At its peak in 1943 there were 333 training schools outside the UK, ninety-two of them in Canada with most of the rest in Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia and India. There were five in the United States. Over the war years they turned out more than 300,000 aircrew for all branches of the RAF.

To leave wartime Britain for North America was to move from monochrome to Technicolor. The transformation began on the boat, often one of the great passenger liners that in peacetime had plied the transatlantic route. Dennis Steiner sailed from Gourock on the Clyde to America on the Queen Elizabeth to continue his training. As Ireland slipped away he sat down for his first meal. ‘We had pork chops and snow-white bread. We hadn’t realized how grey our wartime bread had become.’ The film stars Merle Oberon, Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks who were sailing back to the United States added an extra touch of glamour. The liner docked at New York where the cadets boarded a train for a twenty-seven hour journey to the main receiving centre at Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada.

Dennis Field arrived in Canada in May 1942 to carry on his flying training. ‘The lights, lack of civic restrictions, unrationed goods and food, hospitality of the folk of the small town suddenly flooded with servicemen and the novelty of our new surroundings was appreciated,’ he wrote. At cafés and drugstores they wolfed down ‘huge T-bone steaks covered with two eggs sunny side up and chips, followed by hefty helpings of real strawberry flan and ice cream.’

Those coming the other way found England welcoming and even sophisticated compared with puritanical provincial Canada. Ralph Wood, now trained as a navigator, arrived at the Uxbridge receiving depot in the spring of 1941. He was on his way to the Operational Training Unit (OTU) at Abingdon, Berkshire, before joining 102 Squadron, a Royal Canadian Air Force unit. ‘It was here that we were introduced to English food, Engish pubs and English girls – in that order,’ he wrote. ‘The pubs were happy new experiences for Canadians used to the dingy taverns of home where one was made to feel uncomfortable, if not immoral … the food was plain, palatable and rationed. The girls were friendly and good company …¹⁰

Training was fun, by and large, whether at home or abroad. It was a time of instant friendships and hard, satisfying work relieved by horseplay, laughter and mild excess. Young men who in peacetime would have been rigidly separated by class and circumstances were thrown together and found that they got along fine. Henry Hughes, who was one of eleven children of a poor but happy family in Bolton, Lancashire, was waiting for a Morse test while training in Blackpool when ‘suddenly an airman at our table started to sing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” in a really posh Noël Coward-type voice.’¹¹ The singer was Denholm Elliott who went on to become one of Britain’s best-loved post-war actors. Elliott was at RADA when the war began and had volunteered for the RAF on his eighteenth birthday. He found service life ‘rather exciting. I was mixing for the first time with many different types of men from different strata of society and I found that I was [getting] on really quite well with them. I had been living in a fairly monastic world since the age of nine, in prep and public schools and had never till now seriously rubbed shoulders with such a spectrum of different classes of people. I hardly realized that they existed. I found myself making great mates with all sorts of people I would probably never have met had it not been for joining up to meet the national crisis.’¹²

Discipline was more flexible now. It needed to be. The trainees were individually-minded and, if not for the war, would have been unlikely to have chosen a service career. They were some of the most adventurous spirits of their generation and tended to chafe at unnecessary restrictions and unearned authority. That did not mean they lacked discipline. Rules, they knew, could be broken. But orders had to be obeyed.

Once the trainees arrived at their specialist schools, flying became part of their daily existence, and so inevitably, did death. There was no system which could take the danger out of learning how to operate a bomber. Walking back to Abingdon after a night in the Red Lion pub, Ralph Wood and his fellow-Canadians watched a Whitley which was practising take-offs and landings crash into the commanding officer’s house killing all the crew. It could happen to anybody. Sergeants McClachlan and Iremonger shared a billet with Dennis Field during advanced flying training at South Cerney. They were a worldly pair who seemed to exude confidence. One morning they failed to turn up after night-flying training. They had been killed colliding with each other. When Brian Frow and seven other trainees arrived at the OTU at Cottesmore, they were told by the chief instructor that he had a ‘little job’ for them before they started. ‘This was to act as escort officers at the mass funeral in Cottesmore village for five students who had crashed on the airfield during the week before. We subsequently learned that there had been four fatal crashes in the previous week.’ By the end of the war 8,090 Bomber Command personnel had perished in training accidents, roughly one seventh of all who died, and 4,203 were wounded. The suspicion that many of these deaths had been avoidable created some anger and resentment.

At the end of specialist training everyone was promoted. The majority, about two thirds, became sergeants. The rest were commissioned as pilot officers. The criteria used to award commissions were vague. The logic that leaders were automatically officers was not always followed. The captain of a bomber was the pilot, and it seemed sensible that the captain should hold the senior rank. But it was not unusual for a sergeant pilot to be outranked by his navigator or bomb-aimer. Operating a heavy bomber involved shared responsibility and intense mutual dependence. The anomalies and injustices of drawing distinctions of status, as well as pay and conditions, between men who fought and died inside the same claustrophobic metal tube grated particularly on the Canadians who were providing so many men.

The matter surfaced in May 1942 at an air training conference in Ottawa. It seemed to the Royal Canadian Air Force that there was ‘no justification for the commissioning of some individuals whilst others are required to perform exactly the same duties but in NCO rank.’ The Canadians pointed out the inequities of pay, transportation and travel allowances. Dividing crews into commissioned and non-commissioned officers meant, in theory at least, the end of socializing on an equal footing. Sergeants would go to the sergeants’ mess, officers to the better-appointed officers’ mess. They argued that it could only be bad for team spirit if ‘the crew, as an entity is not able to live and fraternize, the one with the other, during leisure and off-duty hours.’ A radical solution was proposed. Everyone flying in a bomber should be an officer.

The RAF avoided answering the Canadians’ detailed points, but did try to define the qualities that made an officer. Commissions were granted, ‘in recognition of character, intelligence (as distinct from academic qualifications), and capacity to lead, command and set a worthy example. Many aircrews (sic), although quite capable of performing their duties adequately, have no officer qualities.’ The debate fizzled out.

Despite the relative absence of awkwardness about class in the RAF, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that being educated at a public school was no handicap when it came to obtaining a commission. Arriving at Brize Norton Flying Training School in April 1941 Brian Frow and his fellow-trainees were addressed by the chief ground instructor, a squadron leader aged about fifty, with First World War medals on his chest. After a welcoming speech he told his charges he was going to select flight commanders and deputies from among the cadets who would act as leaders and principal contacts between students and staff.

‘We were all sitting in the hall and he started. “Stand up all of those who were in the OTC (Officer Training Corps) at a public school.” About twenty stood up. “Any of you who failed to pass Cert A, sit down.” This left some ten standing. “Sit down those who failed to reach the rank of corporal.” Two more sat down. “Failed to reach sergeant.” Three more sat down. (He) then said, “You five airmen report to my office for interview.”’

When Frow arrived, ‘The first question was “Do you have any close relations who were commissioned in the Royal Air Force?” I had two brothers, and when I said that one was a squadron leader … that was sufficient.’ He was ‘amused and somewhat embarrassed by this method of selecting the cadet flight commanders and their deputies … By a process of elimination, he had dismissed all cadets who had not attended public school, who had not been in the OTC, who had failed to pass Cert A and who had no close relations commissioned into the RAF.’ Frow was duly appointed commander of ‘A’ Flight.

At the same time as they were graded by rank, the cadets earned the right to wear the brevet appropriate to their aircrew category. To outsiders there seemed something unformed about the single wing and circle insignia. It prompted an article by Godfrey Winn, a star writer of the day. ‘Don’t ask the man with one wing when he will finish his training and get the other half of his wings,’ he advised. ‘Don’t ask him anything. Just shake his hand and offer him a drink.’

Aircrew members were proud of their trades. Many had started out hoping to be pilots. Few of those who were reassigned resented for long the new roles they had been allotted. It was the crew that mattered more than one’s individual part in it.

Flying a big bomber was entirely different from flying a Spitfire or a Hurricane. It was the difference, it was sometimes said, between a sports car and a lorry. A four-engined bomber was an immensely complex machine, whose systems needed constant checking. It was a responsibility rather than a pleasure. Tony Iveson who flew Lancasters with 617 Squadron believed that bomber pilots needed ‘a steady personality, and you could tell that from what you heard about how they behaved off duty … I was a natural bomber pilot. I was patient. I liked precise flying.’¹³

Fighter pilots wrote about flying in the language of love and passion. There are no descriptions in letters and memoirs of the joy of flying a Halifax or a Lancaster. In fighter squadrons it was considered disrespectful to refer to your aircraft as anything other than an aeroplane. Bomber Boys called theirs ‘kites’. Operational flying over Germany could mean trips of seven, eight, nine hours. These journeys involved high drama at take-off and landing and intense fear over the target area. But between these peaks of feeling there were long passages of boredom and fatigue, especially on the journey home, even though the danger was far from over.

Crews were organic entities and the prevailing atmosphere was egalitarian. Nonetheless, there was no doubt that it was the pilot who ultimately was in charge. He was responsible for the lives of the other six members of the crew, to the extent that if the aircraft was irretrievably damaged or on fire and about to explode he was expected to stay at the controls until the others had baled out.

The pilot, together with the navigator and the bomb-aimer, were essential for a bomber to be be able to bomb. It was extremely desirable to have a flight engineer, wireless operator and mid-upper and rear gunners. But a sortie could succeed without them.

The pilot’s concern was to reach the target. The navigator’s job was to find it. Don Charlwood, a navigator himself, felt that ‘as a group [they] tended more to seriousness than the men they flew with’.¹⁴ The job, and the training it required, were demanding and exhausting. Noble Frankland, like many navigators, had started off wanting to be a pilot but failed to make the grade. Despite his high intelligence he found the course at his elementary navigation school ‘academically the most difficult thing I had ever tackled’. Astronavigation required an ability to think in three dimensions, ‘a very, very difficult concept for somebody who is not mathematically gifted or trained’.¹⁵ In the early days navigators had no radio aids to guide them to targets. Even with the advent of Gee, Oboe and H2S, which used radio and radar pulses to direct aircraft on to targets, the navigator’s job was the most mentally testing of aircrew tasks, requiring constant alertness at every stage of the journey.

Once the navigator had guided the aircraft to the target area the bomb-aimer took over. As the aircraft went into its bombing run, he became the most important person aboard. He lay face-down in the Perspex nose, exposing the length of his body to the flak bursting all around. Pressing his face to the lens of the complicated bombsight, he called course corrections to the pilot as they went into the final run, ordered the bomb doors open and, when he was satisfied, pressed the button that sent the bombs tumbling into the night. In those final moments, every man aboard was clenched in expectation, pleading with him to finish the job and let them head for home. Good bomb-aimers possessed an almost inhuman sangfroid which allowed them to divorce all feelings for their own safety and that of the crew from the necessity of getting their bombs on the target, or the colour-coded pyrotechnic markers dropped by the leading aircraft to highlight the aiming point. On his debut trip with 49 Squadron to Hagen, in the eastern Ruhr, Donald Falgate, who had defied his parents’ wishes to join up, was ‘determined I was going to get my bombs slap-bang on the target and there was no way I was going to release them if I couldn’t get the markers in the bombsight.’

The pilot weaved to avoid the bursting flak as they went in, toppling the gyroscope that kept the bombsight level, making it impossible for Falgate to aim accurately. He ordered the bomb doors closed and insisted on going round again. ‘I won’t repeat what was said over the intercom by various crew members,’ he said when telling the story later. It was only on the third run that Falgate was satisfied and pressed the bomb release. ‘I was unpopular, very unpopular,’ he recalled many years afterwards.¹⁶

The complexities of four-engined bombers created a need for an extra crew member to assist the pilot. Many flight engineers were ex-groundcrew airmen who already had mechanical skills. Their training included a spell at an aircraft factory producing the type of bomber they would fly in to ensure that they were fluent in all the systems of the huge new machines. In a Lancaster they sat next to, and slightly behind the captain. Their duties included monitoring the panels of dials and warning lights, one for each engine, which were situated on the side of the fuselage out of the pilot’s line of sight. This left him to concentrate on his flying instruments. Their most important responsibility was nursing the fuel levels to ensure there was enough petrol to get home. Engineers received elementary flying training and could theoretically fly the aircraft in an emergency. In practice, if the pilot was dead or too badly hurt to function, the engineer was likely to be in a similar condition.

The wireless operator had, according to Bruce Lewis, who served as one, ‘a lonely existence, mentally isolated from other members of the crew for long periods of time while he strained to listen through the static in his headphones for faint but vital signals.’ These told him the aircraft’s position which he passed on to the navigator. He also manned the radar monitor which warned of the approach of night-fighters.

The gunners had what appeared to be the worst job of all. They lived in metal and Perspex turrets that poked out of the top and the back of the aircraft, washed by whistling winds that could freeze them to their guns. They carried the huge responsibility of defending their mates, constantly scanning the night for flak and fighters. Yet the long hours of staring into darkness meant it was all too easy to lose concentration, even fall asleep. If a night-fighter was spotted a decision that could mean the difference between life or death had to be made. You had seen him, but had he seen you? There was one sure way of ensuring he had, which was to pour glowing tracer fire in his direction. If you got it wrong, your end was particularly lurid. Everyone had a story of seeing the rear gunner being hosed out of a shot-up bomber that had hobbled back to base.

Yet some chose the job. It was the quickest way to an operational squadron with the actual gunnery course taking only six weeks. The training, though, was thorough. By the end, many could manipulate the turrets so well they could trace their names on a board with a pencil wedged in a gun barrel. Cyril March had seen an RAF recruiting poster in the window of Stanton’s furniture store in his native Durham appealing for Tail End Charlies and ‘decided there and then that I would become an air gunner, none of the other trades appealing to me.’ For all the privations and dangers of the job it was possible to get used to it or even enjoy it. ‘In the end you learned to love it, strangely to say,’ said Edward Twinn, who had abandoned a safe job in a reserved occupation to join up. ‘You were the king of your own castle, right back there on your own. You never spoke to anybody unless the pilot gave you orders, so there you were sixty feet from the rest of the crew, all together at the front of the aircraft. They could see each other, they were near each other and they had that bond of being together. But the rear gunner, no, he was right out on a limb, down the other end looking the other way. Many of the raids lasted seven, eight, eight and a half hours … you never left your turret at all. It was lonely but you got used to it. And you were there for the crew’s protection and they were a lovely crew.’¹⁷

After finishing their specialist training pilots, navigators and bomb-aimers had a further spell at an advanced school before finally arriving at an OTU. Wireless operators and gunners went there directly.

At the OTUs the British came together with their Australian and New Zealand counterparts from the Empire schools (the Canadians formed their own, separate group of squadrons). It was here that one of the most crucial processes in the training programme took place, the welding of individuals into crews. For each member, the crew would from now on be the centre of his existence. Life beyond the base, the world of parents and family and home, drifted to the margins of their thoughts. The six men you would share your bomber with were now the most important people in the world.

The process of selection was called ‘crewing up’. In devising it the RAF departed from its strictly utilitarian selection and training methods and took an enormous leap of faith. Instead of attempting a scientific approach to gauge compatibility they put their trust entirely in the magic of human chemistry. The crews selected themselves. The procedure was simple. The requisite numbers of each aircrew category were put together in a large room and told to team up. Jack Currie, who reached his OTU at the end of 1942, ‘hadn’t realized that the crewing-up procedure would be so haphazard, so unorganized. I’d imagined that the process would be just as impersonal as most others that we went through in the RAF. I thought I would just see an order on the noticeboard detailing who was crewed with whom. But what happened was quite different. When we had all paraded in the hangar and the roll had been called, the chief ground instructor got up on a dais. He wished us good morning … and said: “Right chaps, sort yourselves out.”’

Currie stood among the other sergeant pilots and, trying not to stare at anyone in particular, looked around him. ‘There were bomb-aimers, navigators, wireless operators and gunners and I needed one of each to form my crew. I didn’t know any of them; up to now my air force would have been peopled by pilots. This was a crowd of strangers. I had a sudden recollection of standing in a surburban dance-hall, wondering which girl I should approach. I remembered that it wasn’t always the prettiest or the smartest girl who made the best companion for the evening. Anyway, this wasn’t the same as choosing a dancing partner, it was more like picking out a sweetheart or a wife, for better or for worse.’

Like most pilots, the first thing Currie looked for was a navigator. He saw a knot of them standing together. But how was he to pick one?

I couldn’t assess what his aptitude with a map and dividers might be from his face, or his skill with a sextant from the size of his feet. I noticed that a wiry little Australian was looking at me anxiously. He took a few steps forward, eyes puckered in a diffident smile and spoke: ‘Looking for a good navigator?’ I walked to meet him. He was an officer. I looked down into his eyes, and received an impression of honesty, intelligence and nervousness. He said:

‘You needn’t worry. I did all right on the course!’

I held out my hand. ‘Jack Currie.’

‘I’m Jim Cassidy. Have you got a bomb-aimer? I know a real good one. He comes from Brisbane, like me. I’ll fetch him over.’

The bomb-aimer had a gunner in tow and while we were sizing each other up, we were joined by a tall wireless-operator, who introduced himself in a gentle Northumbrian accent and suggested that it was time for a cup of tea. As we walked to the canteen, I realized that I hadn’t made a single conscious choice.¹⁸

At some OTUs new arrivals were given up to a fortnight to team up. Harry Yates, having got over his disappointment at not being posted to a fighter squadron, arrived at Westcott with the ambition to ‘skipper a well-drilled crew, the best on the squadron, every man handpicked, utterly professional at his job and dedicated to the team.’ He started his search in the officers’ mess where he found himself at the bar next to Pilot Officer Bill Birnie, a stocky New Zealander navigator who ‘seemed to be the sort of tough-minded chap who knew the score’. During the evening’s socializing he noticed a young pilot officer wearing a wireless operator’s badge. For a wireless operator to be commissioned so early in his career suggested exceptional ability. So Rob Bailey, ‘tall, slim and blessed with the dark, aquiline looks that women tend to admire’, was in.

The following day the 220 men of the intake assembled in a hangar to finish off the process. They were mostly formed into twos and threes now and there was ‘a lot of movement and noise’, as they scrambled to complete their teams. Bill Birnie disappeared into the crowd and returned ‘with a bronze-skinned giant in tow. This was Flight Sergeant Inia Maaka, the first Maori I’d ever met and I knew the bomb-aimer for me.’ Mac, as he immediately became known, ‘was a stranger to the inner tensions and vanities that make liars of the rest of us’. He had wanted to fight the war as a pilot and had won a place at elementary flying school but had not been selected to advance and been reassigned to bombing school. ‘He clearly loved the job,’ Yates recorded, ‘there wasn’t a hint of second best.’ It was Mac who found the gunners: Geoff Fallowfield, an extrovert eighteen-year-old Londoner and Norrie Close, a taciturn Yorkshireman, who was a month younger still. ‘So there they were,’ Yates marvelled later, ‘my crew: a straight and level Kiwi, a ladykiller; a Maori warrior; and two lads as different as chalk from cheese.’¹⁹

Such assorted crews were the norm. The mysterious chemistry that had brought them together was durable. Many crews forged bonds of affection and respect that, if they came through the war, lasted until the grave. It was rare for an Englishman to have met a Canadian or an Australian, yet when crewing up they seemed drawn to each other, confirming the wisdom of the process. Group Captain Hamish Mahaddie, who was tasked with finding talent for the Pathfinder Force, which was formed to lead the main bomber force to the target, believed that ‘the best crews were a mixture’.²⁰

The system was not perfect. At Bruntingthorpe OTU Cyril March teamed up with an Australian skipper, navigator and wireless operator. The rest of the crew were English. ‘We did our job and had one or two good thrashes but we were never all together and to my mind we didn’t gel.’ Their first training trip was a fighter affiliation exercise in which the pilot was expected to throw the Wellington around the sky to shake off the ‘attacker’. After a row with the navigator, he appeared to lose control and ordered the crew to crash positions. The bomber landed but overshot the runway coming to a halt in the grass. The next trip took place in clear sunshine but the captain still managed to lose his way. March ‘felt so bloody helpless. I was doing my job, telling them when we were passing over airfields and such. I couldn’t help thinking [what] if this were Germany on a black night with duff winds etcetera – Christ!’ Word of the crew’s failings reached the station authorities. It was split up and its members redistributed. This time March was lucky. The first of his new comrades was Ken Ford, a Londoner, who with the rest of the crew, became his lifelong friends.

Ken took me to meet my new skipper, a tousle-haired fair Aussie with steady blue eyes and a friendly grin. ‘I’m Neville Emery,’ he said, ‘Bug to my mates.’ I had noticed he had been eyeing me up and down and asked him why. ‘Oh nothing mate,’ he said laughing. ‘Kenny was telling me that you were an old married man.’ I was just twenty-one. I met Des Gee the Aussie wireless operator, again blond and blue-eyed; then Ray Brooker, a dark Englishman from Cambridge, the bomb-aimer with a ready smile. Then I met Terry Sayles, a Yorkshireman from Doncaster, the navigator. I told him my name was Cyril. ‘Hi Cy,’ he said and that was my name thenceforth. Des got me a bed in their Nissen hut and helped me move my gear in. That night they weren’t flying and they said, ‘Coming down the village for a jar?’ ‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Where’s your bike, Cy?’ Terry asked. ‘Bike!’ I replied, ‘I haven’t got one.’ He got one, I don’t know where and I didn’t ask. Off we went in formation. I knew I was in a crew at long last.

They came back in high spirits, yelling ‘Bring out your dead’ as they wobbled on their bikes over rickety planks bridging the Leicestershire ditches. Cyril was happy and content. ‘I knew then that with these lads we would survive, no doubt about it.’

This, in the end, was what the airmen were searching for as they milled around the hangars looking for kindred spirits. An efficient air, a friendly manner were all very well. But in the end, the most attractive quality anyone could possess was to seem lucky.

Inevitably, when the mating ritual finished, a gaggle of wallflowers remained. ‘At the end of the day there were some odd bods left around who … had no choice but to take the leftovers,’ said Tom Wingham, who flew with 102 Squadron. ‘[You] had a feeling that they weren’t going to make it and inevitably they didn’t. They didn’t have that same sort of “gel”. I suppose you could say they had the smell of death about them and it was not funny.’²¹

The men that would lead them through the final stage of training and into the daunting world of ‘ops’ seemed old, even though many were only in their mid-twenties. These were the veterans, ‘tour-expired’ survivors of thirty operations or more. ‘It was our first close contact with people who had completed operations, surviving against unlikely odds,’ wrote Dennis Field. ‘Gongs were common, almost part of the dress, and worn without flamboyance. Although we were keen to hear and learn all we could, in off-duty hours they stayed detached and there was little line-shooting in our presence. We realized that within a few months we should all meet some ultimate experience.’

Instructing posts were the reward for survival. Not that such jobs were free of risk. Half of the flying done at OTUs was at night. The darkness, and the sometimes clapped-out machines which were used for training meant that deadly accidents were routine. After agreeing to fly with one captain, Dennis Steiner was approached by two other pilots whom he had to turn down. Subsequently, one flew into the ground for no discoverable reason, killing himself and all his crew. The other developed engine trouble during a flight and ordered the crew to bale out. ‘Their luck ran out soon after when at night a practice bomb from another aircraft fell on them and they crashed,’ he wrote. ‘None of the crew survived. The line between surviving or not was becoming very thin.’

It seemed to Ken Newman that at least some of the accidents were due to criminal recklessness rather than the demands of war. In February 1944 he went to a Heavy Conversion Unit for a month’s training. This was where crews familiarized themselves with the types that they would be flying on operations. Newman was learning his way around the Halifax. ‘The aircraft were old, poorly maintained and in the most part barely airworthy. But it was constantly drilled into us that complaints would not be entertained and if we refused to fly because we thought a Halifax was not airworthy, or for a reason that the staff decided was trivial, we would be treated as LMF [Lacking in Moral Fibre, the RAF bureaucratic euphemism for the accusation of cowardice].’ This was very much the view of the chief flying instructor who Newman held responsible for the death of one of his best friends and all his crew.

He had met Alec, ‘a tall, likeable chap’ while training in South Africa and caught up with him at RAF Lindholme where the HCU was based. One night he was detailed for a high-level cross-country flight, even though the weather forecast had warned of heavy cloud and severe icing conditions. To reduce the risk, it was essential to fly at maximum altitude. ‘Alec took off and after a while found that his aircraft would not climb above 15,000 feet. Consequently he returned to RAF Lindholme. Wing Commander X heard about this and ordered Alec to continue the exercise, refusing to believe that the aircraft could not reach a safe height and accused him of being LMF. Intimidated, Alec and his crew went off. The following day we heard that his aircraft had crashed into a Scottish mountain and all were dead.’ The instructor was to die in an accident a few months later.²²

The road to the operational squadrons was long and expensive. It cost on average £10,000 to train each crew member, the equivalent, according to one indicator, of about £850,000 in today’s money. This was a lot to pay to get each Bomber Boy into battle. It did not, however, mean that when they got there, their lives would be worth very much.

5 Dying in the Dark

Bomber Command lost 4,823 men and 2,331 aircraft on operations in the first two years of the war. There was very little to show for it. In that time it dropped only 35,194 tons of bombs. That was two thousand tons less than it dropped in the single month of May, 1944. Despite the great effort, the resulting destruction was often small and the casualties inflicted were minimal. A typical night’s work was that of 29/30 August 1941. More than 140 aircraft were sent to attack railways and harbours in Frankfurt. They reached their target successfully and began bombing. They managed to do some damage to a gasworks, a barrel warehouse and a few houses and to kill eight people. In the course of the operation one Hampden was lost without trace. Another crashed in France killing all on board. A Halifax crew baled out over England after running out of fuel but two men died in the process, one after his parachute got caught in the tailplane. A Whitley was forced to ditch off the Essex coast. All in all, the operation resulted in the loss of sixteen lives – two for every German killed – and seven aircraft. Despite the sacrifice, the attack barely bothered the Frankfurt authorities who nonchalantly recorded the raid as ‘light and scattered bombing’.

The perils of each trip mounted as the German fighter and flak defences adapted and improved. In March 1941, Doug Mourton arrived at 102 Squadron to fly as a wireless operator on Whitleys. One night his crew were detailed to attack Hamburg. Initially, it seemed ‘a comparatively easy trip’. They took off in bright moonlight and as the target approached Mourton could see another Whitley flying a parallel course. ‘Suddenly it exploded. What had been an aircraft a few seconds before, was now a mass of debris, flying through the air. It had apparently been hit by an anti-aircraft shell, most likely in its bomb bay …’ He learned later that the pilot had been Alec Elliot, his best friend on the squadron with whom he had passed many nights in the pub and played innumerable games of crib while waiting in the crew room.¹

After enduring such experiences the crews were reluctant to believe that their efforts were being wasted. To be able to carry on it was necessary to persuade oneself that the risks were worth it. From the air it was impossible to know whether or not a raid had succeeded. The sight of big fires burning below was taken as a measure of success. But they could not know what these blazes were. The Germans soon suspected that the attacking aircraft had often only the haziest idea of their whereabouts. They developed a system of decoy fires which they hoped the arriving aircraft would mistake for the target. It worked very well. Many a crew returned home satisfied they had carried out their mission after bombing empty countryside.

A different sort of deception was being perpetrated on the home front. Government propaganda painted a picture of continuous success. A broadcast by Flight Lieutenant J. C. Mackintosh, a bomb-aimer in a Hampden, made night bombing sound like a cool, precise science. His script started with the bold assertion that ‘when the war began we were well-trained in finding targets in the dark and were therefore never compelled to bomb indiscriminately through the clouds.’ He went on to describe a recent attack on an oil refinery. At first, the crew thought it a tricky target. But the fact that it was sited near a bend on a river which would provide a useful navigational reference caused them to decide that ‘perhaps, after all, it would not be such a difficult job to find.’ As they entered the target area they located the river but after three runs through anti-aircraft fire had still not spotted the objective. Mackintosh gamely called on the skipper to go round once more. Then, ‘there it was. The dim outline of an oil refinery wonderfully camouflaged. It was getting more and more into the centre of the sights. I pressed the button and my stick of bombs went hurtling towards Germany’s precious oil. The rear gunner watched the bombs burst and in a very few seconds those thousands of tons of valuable oil had become hundreds of feet of black and acrid smoke.’²

This was strategic bombing as dreamt of by the Air Ministry planners. But it was rare indeed that events followed Mackintosh’s script. A more typical experience was that of Eric Woods, who had joined the RAF before the war as a reservist and qualified as a navigator before being sent to 144 Squadron. His first operation was on the night of 9/10 October 1940 and the target was the Krupp factory in Essen, one of the first of many that would be launched against this citadel of German military industry. At the briefing the crews were told they could expect only scattered cloud over the target. But ‘from the outset it was obvious that the Met people had got it wrong as a solid mass of cloud was clearly visible below and as we progressed eastwards we saw that the cloud was becoming denser ahead. We pressed on but two ominous developments took place: a film of ice appeared on the windscreen and an opaque mass of rime ice began to spread out along the leading edge of each wing.’ His Hampden’s twin engines started to run rough as ice found its way into the fuel inlet system. ‘There was a hurried conference since it was pretty obvious that the target was unlikely to be identifiable, so the decision was taken to fly on and see what happened when we reached our ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival). In the event at that time we were still in dense cloud, the whole mass being lit up by searchlights sweeping below, with frequent bright flashes which could have been anti-aircraft fire or bomb bursts, I certainly knew not what.’ With no sight of the ground and dreadful weather conditions a decision was made not to bomb but to seek some alternative target on the way home. As they headed homewards ‘the cloud began to break up to the west, quite the opposite to what the weatherman had said … we did in fact fly along the Scheldt estuary and as we passed over the port of Flushing the navigator let go with our total load and I clearly saw bomb bursts though I wasn’t sure precisely where they landed.’³ Only three of the aircraft that set out reached their target.

The basic problem remained navigation. There was no accurate means of directing the bombers to faraway targets and none would arrive until March 1942. In the meantime, navigators relied on dead reckoning and the main instrumental aid was the sextant. This was still the pioneer age of bombing. ‘The aircraft were without heating and the cold was appalling,’ wrote Doug Mourton later. ‘The crews flew clothed in layers of silk, wool and leather and yet they were still bitterly cold. Vital systems jammed, wings iced up for lack of adequate de-icing gear [and] guns froze …’ The navigator gave his pilot a course on take-off and then, if he was lucky and the skies were clear, looked out for landmarks to check if they were on track. When visiting Germany they left England’s shores over Flamborough Head then scoured the sea below for the Friesian Islands off the Dutch coast, where German night-fighters lurked, straining to get at the raiders. If the conditions were right, the navigator might use his sextant to obtain a fix from the stars, but only if the pilot was willing to fly straight and level long enough. The crews were given a weather forecast before leaving, but they were notoriously unreliable. Predicted winds failed to blow and unpredicted ones drove the bombers hopelessly off course. It was no wonder that German targets were sometimes unaware that they had been the subject of an attempted attack.

The gap between what was expected of the RAF and what it could in fact deliver was enormous. The man whose task it was to narrow it was Charles Portal, appointed to the top air force post of Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) in October 1940 at the young age of forty-seven. The promotion came after a brief, six-month stint as the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. He was to stay in his post for the rest of the war. Portal was short and stocky, with a lean, creased face, hooded eyes and a large, hooked nose which gave him the look of one of the falcons he had reared when a schoolboy at Winchester. He was at Christ Church, Oxford, when the war broke out in 1914, and immediately suspended his studies to go to France as a motorcyclist with the Royal Engineers. In 1915 he joined the Royal Flying Corps and finished the war as a lieutenant-colonel. His intellectual gifts and boundless capacity for work ensured that his subsequent climb was sure and fast. His character and demeanour contrasted sharply with that of Arthur Harris. He hid his feelings behind a mask of scrupulous courtesy and expressed himself quietly and subtly. Whereas Harris was capable of rough bonhomie, Portal never unbent. Those around him noticed that beyond his family he had no close friends, gently repelling company when he dined at the Travellers’ Club at the end of his long working day.

Portal’s part in the policy of attacking whole cities, ‘area bombing’ in the bureaucratic euphemism of the day, is little known or remembered nowadays, while Harris’s name will be linked to it for ever. But his enthusiasm for the project was, at the outset at least, just as great as that of his subordinate and he was prepared to express himself forcefully in support of it even when Churchill’s faith faltered.

As head of Bomber Command at the start of the Blitz he sympathized with the public desire for revenge and had joined Churchill in urging reprisals on a reluctant Air Staff. On arriving at the top, he stressed the need to destroy the resolve of the German people by smashing their towns and cities. The rhythms of Bomber Command’s activities would vary from time to time as it was diverted to deal with various threats and crises. But, until the run-up to D-Day, this was to be the central theme of the air war.

In successive directives Portal continued to point his men towards industrial and military targets. But great emphasis was given to the will-sapping potential that he claimed would result. On 30 October 1940, as London prepared to endure its 53rd night of continuous bombardment, he wrote to Sir Richard Peirse who had replaced him as C-in-C, Bomber Command, that

the time seems particularly opportune to make a definite attempt with our offensive to affect the morale of the German people when they can no longer expect an early victory and are faced with the near approach of winter and the certainty of a long war … if bombing is to have its full moral effect, it must on occasions produce heavy material destruction. Widespread light attacks are more likely to produce contempt for bombing than fear of it. I am therefore directed to say that as an alternative to attacks designed for material destruction against our primary objectives, it is desired that regular concentrated attacks shall be made on objectives in large towns and centres of industry with the prime aim of causing heavy material destruction, which will demonstrate to the enemy the power and severity of air bombardment and the hardship and dislocation that will result from it.

Berlin was put first on the list for Bomber Command’s attentions. If it was clouded over, other towns in central and western Germany were to be considered. Aircraft industry and oil targets might also be selected, as long as they were ‘suitably placed in the centres of the towns or populated districts’. The directive envisaged sending greater numbers of aircraft, carrying a mix of bombs. The first to arrive would drop incendiaries to set the target area ablaze. The following force would then ‘focus their attacks to a large extent on the fires with a view to preventing the fire-fighting services dealing with them and giving the fires every opportunity to spread.’⁴ This amounted to an explicit announcement that the strategic aim now was to achieve blanket destruction, disruption and death.

In reality, Bomber Command lacked the resources to carry out such an apocalyptic plan. Even if it had the aircraft and equipment, it would never be able to mount a concentrated and relentless campaign while it was subject to the apparently insatiable calls on its services from the War Cabinet, navy and army.

On top of the strategic targets, oil and now cities, Bomber Command was supposed to support the navy by laying mines at sea. In March 1941 another great responsibility was loaded on to its shoulders. German submarines and bombers were wreaking terrible damage on the transatlantic convoys carrying the cargoes that kept Britain alive and threatening to sever Britain’s vital ocean links with America. Churchill ordered Portal to concentrate on attacking the yards that built the U-boats and the pens where they sheltered, as well as the factories and bases which produced and housed the maritime bombers. Bomber Command did its best against these targets, and the great German warships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst in their haven at Brest, but the effects were limited. Its aircraft were withdrawn after four months and it was left to Coastal Command and the Royal Navy, aided by improvements in technology and resources, to turn the Battle of the Atlantic Britain’s way.

The diversion deflected Peirse from his intention to use the improved conditions of spring to systematically pursue oil targets. The ‘oil plan’ had many powerful supporters inside the Air Staff and among civilian specialist strategic advisers. They saw the destruction of synthetic oil plants, which transformed Germany’s rich coal reserves into liquid fuels and lubricants, as a quick way of bringing the enemy to its knees. The plan would swing in and out of favour throughout the war. But the prescription was easier than the practice. Despite the claims of official propaganda, when oil targets were attacked, the results were often miserable. The plants were sited away from the big towns and were hard to find and even harder to destroy or damage. If the bombers missed them, as they usually did, their bombs hit nothing but fields and forests. The new practice of using high-flying Spitfires for photo reconnaissance the morning after a raid allowed an operation’s success to be assessed scientifically rather than relying on the visual reports and blurry night-time images submitted by the crews from onboard cameras. In the absence of hard evidence, optimism about the progress of the campaign had remained high in the upper reaches of the RAF. The daylight pictures showed it to be misplaced. No assumptions could be made about bombing accuracy. The truth, according to Sir John Slessor, who had taken over 5 Group of Bomber Command in May 1941, was that the crews were ‘failing to find and hit any but the most obvious targets on the clearest moonlight nights’.⁵

It became clear to Portal that, as things stood, the only target that Bomber Command could be guaranteed to find was a largish town. The attacks on London, Coventry, Southampton, Plymouth and elsewhere had provided more than enough justification for retaliating in kind. Britain had suffered an unprecedented loss of innocent life. By the time the Blitz petered out in May 1941, more than 41,000 civilians had been killed and 137,000 injured. Such a policy, Portal now believed, was not simply faute de mieux, but a logical and desirable course of action.

The new, or rather resumed, thinking was spelled out in another Portal directive to Bomber Command dated 9 July 1941. It stated that a comprehensive review of Germany’s political, economic and military situation disclosed that one of ‘the weakest points in his armour’ lay in the morale of the civilian population. It called for ‘heavy, concentrated and continuous area attacks of large working-class and industrial areas in carefully selected towns’. At the end of August the formula was extended to smaller towns so that they too could experience ‘the direct effect of our offensive’.⁶

This marked another important step in the shift from scrupulousness to ruthlessness. Before the war the British government had assured the world it had no intention of bombing civilians. Now the RAF had been nudged on to a heading which made the mass killing of civilians inevitable. The faith that was put in the belief that this would produce beneficial results by undermining the Germans’ will to fight on was puzzling. Nothing that had happened in the war to date supported Trenchard’s dictum that the moral effect of bombing was twenty times greater than the material effect. If anything, the experience of Coventry, London and other blitzed towns like Plymouth and Liverpool, suggested the opposite. Yet in the absence of any immediate alternative, what was an ill-founded opinion began to take on the solidity of an iron law of war.

Trenchard was an old man now but he was still regarded with reverence by the military establishment and his views were treated with respect. In May 1941 he sent a memorandum on the current state of the air war to the Chiefs of Staff. He reduced the complexities of the problems facing the RAF to one simple proposition. It was, he reiterated, all a question of national morale and who could stand their losses best. There was no doubt about the answer. For Trenchard, the ‘outstanding fact’ of the current situation was ‘the ingrained morale of the British nation which is nowhere more strongly manifest than in its ability to stand up to losses and its power to bear the whole strain of war and its casualties.’ History had proved ‘that we have always been able to stand our casualties better than other Nations.’ As for the enemy, ‘all the evidence of the last war and of this, shows that the German nation is peculiarly susceptible to air bombing. While the A.R.P. services are probably organized with typical German efficiency, their total disregard to the well-being of the population tends to a dislocation of ordinary life which has its inevitable reaction on civilian morale. The ordinary people are neither allowed, nor offer, to play their part in rescue or restoration work; virtually imprisoned in their shelters or within the bombed area, they remain passive and easy prey to hysteria and panic without anything to mitigate the inevitable confusion and chaos. There is no joking in the German shelters as in ours, nor the bond which unites the public with A.R.P. and Military services here of all working together in a common cause to defeat the attacks of the enemy.’ This, he concluded ‘is their weak point compared with ourselves and it is at this weak point that we should strike and strike again.’ Such a policy would mean ‘fairly heavy casualties’ for those doing the bombing, but Trenchard had faith in their toughness. In his judgement, ‘the pilots in the last war stood it, and the pilots in this war are even better and, I feel, would welcome a policy of this description.’⁷

Where Trenchard got his information from was a mystery. At least one pilot had a very different appreciation of the morale question. In the early winter of 1942 when Bomber Command was beginning to bring the war to the German people Guy Gibson was still unconvinced that domestic morale would collapse. ‘We are dealing with the mass pyschology of a nation and a bad nation at that,’ he told Charles Martin, the adjutant of 106 Squadron. ‘It is run, organized and controlled by Gestapo and SS Police … the fact still remains that if they were to give in they would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. I think myself they will fight to the end.’ Gibson had little time for ‘people who go around talking so much bull about the crack appearing and once the crack has appeared the foundation will weaken etc., etc.’⁸

Most people who were running the war agreed with Trenchard. It would have seemed defeatist to say otherwise. Identifying morale as the main target also provided some hope of progress at a time when there was little to show that Bomber Command was achieving anything. Any scrap of evidence was seized on as proof of the wisdom of this course. In September 1941 the American correspondent William Shirer who knew Nazi Germany well, wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph saying that attacking war industries was not enough. ‘What [the RAF] must do is to keep the German people in their damp, cold cellars at night, prevent them from sleeping and wear down their nerves. Those nerves are already very thin after seven years of belt-tightening Nazi mobilization for total war. The British should do this every night.’ The cutting was reverently placed in an Air Ministry file. The Ministry of Information maintained its own survey. It had concluded as early as December 1940 that ‘the Germans, for all their present confidence and cockiness will not stand a quarter of the bombing that the British have shown they can take.’

In the middle of 1941 support for the bombing offensive was sustained by faith rather than evidence, but the absence of a rational foundation for belief meant only that the flame of conviction burned all the brighter. It was not only Portal and the Air Staff who believed. The heads of the navy and the army became fervent converts. At the end of July 1941 they had produced a statement on general British strategy in which they declared their support for Bomber Command’s mission and admitted they were relying on an all-out attack by the RAF to create the conditions for a land invasion and victory. Inter-service jealousy over resources, hitherto a genetic condition, was forgotten as the air force was offered everything it wanted.

They approved the building of heavy bombers as a first priority ‘for only the heavy bomber can produce the conditions under which other offensive force can be employed.’ They endorsed the view that the focus of attack should be ‘on civilian morale with the intensity and continuity which are essential if a final breakdown is to be produced.’ If the plan was pursued ‘on a vast scale, the whole structure upon which the German forces are based, the economic system, the machinery for production and destruction, the morale of the nation will be destroyed.’ This was just the ‘bull about the crack appearing’ that Gibson had found so unconvincing.

Soon afterwards an attempt was made to translate what were instinctive suppositions into hard formulae. In September 1941 the Directorate of Bomber Operations at the Air Ministry began working on a new plan. In an important departure from previous practice it was based not on what Bomber Command might do, but on what the Luftwaffe had already done. By analysing the damage caused by German air attacks on London, Coventry, and other English towns, the planners came up with a yardstick of what was needed to mount an all-out offensive on German towns.

They used an ‘index of activity’ to gauge the effects of bombing on a town’s ability to function. Coventry, it was reckoned, had suffered a 63 per cent reduction in its index of activity the morning after the raid. The calculation included not just physical destruction but also psychological damage; fear and demoralization. It had taken Coventry thirty-five days to recover. Four or five follow-up attacks on the same scale, it was reckoned, would have crippled the city’s ability to operate. A sixth raid would have put it ‘beyond all hope of recovery’.

Using the same encouraging extrapolations that were always employed with such calculations, it concluded that if 4,000 bombers were directed against forty-three towns with populations of 100,000 or more, Germany would be finished. At the time, the average daily availability of bombers was just over 500. Portal approved the plan and passed it on to the prime minister promising ‘decisive results’ in six months if he was given the aircraft required.

But Churchill’s initial enthusiasm was faltering. A minute study of reconnaissance photographs ordered by Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Cherwell had revealed in undeniable detail the blindness of the bombing effort. The work was carried out by D. R. Butt, a civil servant with the Cabinet secretariat. His job was to analyse photographs taken on one hundred night attacks during June and July 1941. The results, published in August 1941, were dismaying. The essential finding was that of those crews claiming to have attacked a target in Germany, only one in four got within five miles of it. Over the Ruhr the proportion was one in ten. The statistics related only to aircraft recorded as attacking the target. One third of the crews failed to get within five miles of it.

These figures, if true, were shocking and at Bomber Command, Sir Richard Peirse and his senior officers tried to dispute them. Churchill, however, had been persuaded. He was in no mood then, to give a positive reception to another plan based on the unverifiable. His view was summed up in a pessimistic minute of 27 September that contradicted everything he had previously said as prime minister on the subject of bombing. ‘It is very disputable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war. On the contrary, all that we have learnt since the war shows that its effects, both physical and moral, are greatly exaggerated.’

These words caused great anxiety to Portal and his men. Churchill appeared to be saying that he had no confidence in their approach to the air war. Portal took several days thinking about his response. His reply, when it came, was robust. He told the prime minister that it was too soon to come to such a definite conclusion as a serious bombing campaign had yet to begin. It was difficult to believe that any country could withstand indefinitely the scale of attack contemplated in the new plan. German air raids in the previous year caused death or serious injury to 93,000 British civilians. This result had been achieved with a small fraction of the bomb load Bomber Command hoped to employ in 1943. He repeated what had now become an article of faith. ‘The consensus of informed opinion,’ he declared, ‘is that German morale is much more vulnerable to bombing than our own.’

Portal was calling Churchill’s bluff. The prime minister’s doubts had come very late in the day. The whole bomber programme, aircraft production, aircrew training and technical developments were based on the understanding articulated by the Chiefs of Staff back on 31 July that bombing on an unprecedented scale was the weapon Britain had to depend on to bring victory. He pointed out that if Churchill had ‘ceased to believe in the efficacy of the bomber as a war-winning weapon’ then a new plan would have to be produced. This would mean a complete reshaping of the RAF’s main effort and remove it from the battlefield for many months to come. Britain would be denied its only means of waging war on the enemy’s own territory.

Churchill had no real choice but to back down and he did so, but not before sounding a sour cautionary note. ‘I deprecate,’ he wrote on 7 October, ‘placing unbounded confidence in this means of attack and still more in expressing that confidence in terms of arithmetic.’ In the end, he concluded, ‘the only plan is to persevere’.

This period marked the lowest point in Bomber Command’s war, a demoralizing period of costly experimentation. In its short life, aerial warfare had gained enormous importance in the minds of politicians, soldiers and the public. But no one yet understood exactly what it was for. Defending the failures of the early years Slessor reminded a post-war audience that ‘this was the first air war (his emphasis.) … we had embarked upon it, not only with totally inadequate weapons and woefully incomplete intelligence about our enemy but with virtually no experience whatever to guide us.’⁹ Operations had never achieved a consistent tempo as the emphasis shifted from target to target and even, as the Battle of the Atlantic broke out, from land to sea with squadrons being transferred temporarily or permanently to Coastal Command. Throughout the year preconceived expansion plans had to give way to the constant diversion of aircraft and crew to other theatres.

During 1941, 1,341 aircraft were lost on operations, meaning that the average first-line strength had been destroyed roughly two and a half times over. These great sacrifices failed to make any significant impression on Germany. The ports of Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen had suffered some damage, but the Ruhr, the heart of Germany’s war industry, remained almost completely intact. Bomber Command’s main achievement had been to give heart to the Blitz-battered British people. As it did so, its own morale was beginning to fray. In 106 Squadron, where Michael Wood was piloting a Hampden, ‘there was a story going around that the accounts related by one of our crews were suspect and did not tie up with the accounts of the target area put forward by the rest of the squadron. The CO became suspicious and arranged to plot the course of the aircraft in question. From the information gathered, it transpired that the aircraft was flying up and down the North Sea dropping their bombs in the drink and, after the necessary time lapse, flying back to base.’ Wood never verified the story. But the fact that it was doing the rounds was indicative of the low mood.

One pilot from 144 Squadron was court-martialled for a similar-sounding incident. Sergeant W, a married man with two young children who had been a grocer in civilian life before joining the RAF in 1938, was accused of ‘failing to use his utmost exertions’ to carry out orders. He had been detailed to attack Frankfurt on the night of 22/23 July 1941. On his return, he reported that the mission had been successful. A few days later, the navigator on the trip informed a senior officer that they had never reached Germany at all. The pilot maintained that the navigator, who had been borrowed for the operation, was incompetent and had failed to provide the correct headings to reach the target, resulting in them flying around the North Sea for nearly seven hours. The navigator maintained that the skipper was ‘windy’ and had never intended to carry out the attack. Sergeant W was backed up by three other members of his crew. He was an experienced pilot who had spent seven months on the squadron and whose conduct had until then satisfied his CO. Had he reported the failure to complete the mission it was unlikely that matters would have developed as drastically as they did. As it was, he told the court-martial, ‘after landing and thinking back over the trip, I decided to say nothing about getting lost. In consequence the personal experience report was made out as for a successful trip.’ The worst interpretation was put on his actions. He was found guilty and sentenced to be reduced to the ranks, imprisoned with hard labour for two years and discharged with ignominy from the service. The sentence was cut to six months on appeal.¹⁰

For all the institutional belief in British resilience, no one in authority was going to tell anyone, civilian or airman, how little the campaign was really achieving. ‘Fortunately,’ wrote Slessor, ‘I think the crews were for the most part sustained by the belief that they were hitting the enemy harder than they actually were.’¹¹

The futility of the effort was starkly revealed on the night of 7/8 November. The weather forecast was abysmal, with thick cloud, storms, ice and hail predicted. Sir Richard Peirse nonetheless ordered 392 aircraft, a record number, into attacks on Berlin, Cologne and Mannheim, as well as smaller operations against Boulogne and Ostend. The weather was particularly atrocious along the North Sea routes leading to Berlin. Of the 169 bombers sent to Berlin, less than half got anywhere near it. Those that did, barely scratched the city. The official survey reported damage to one industrial building, two railway premises, a gasometer, two administrative buildings, thirty houses (fourteen of which were destroyed), sixteen garden sheds and one farm building. Eleven people were killed and fourteen injured. Bomber Command however lost twenty-one aircraft, 12.4 per cent of those dispatched. Eighty-eight airmen died; eight for every German killed by their bombs. All together thirty-seven aircraft were lost, 9.7 per cent of the force. This loss was double what had been suffered in any previous night operation. Peirse had gone ahead despite protests, notably from Slessor who had been allowed to withdraw his 5 Group aircraft from the force and send them instead to Cologne. His refusal to cancel the operation seems to have been driven by a desperate desire to achieve results when faith in his leadership was dwindling. It was a gamble rather than a calculated risk and it was taken with the lives of men whose fate he held in trust.

Some of those taking part in the raid had sensed disaster from the beginning. Sergeant John Dobson, only nineteen years old but already one of 218 Squadron’s most experienced pilots, was woken at 6 a.m. on the morning of 7 November, an unusually early hour that suggested that a daylight operation was planned. Half-asleep, crotchety, some of them mildly hungover, the squadron slouched to the briefing room. Dobson sat down and his crew grouped themselves on the chairs around him. There was ‘no greeting, just a plain and dismal silence’. He pulled out his cigarettes from his pyjama pocket and ‘exercised the Skipper’s prerogative of offering each crew member a fag. A sharp, grating sound, puff, puff, puff and then silence once more. The whole room was silent and pent up with a fierce concentration. No celluloid sallies here, no carefree chatter which film-struck spinsters associate with an operational briefing … we were all in the bluest of blue funks so that no one dare speak for fear of voicing with his eyes or gruffness his innermost, uppermost fear of the unknown. More especially today it was felt, because of the unusual hour, which [preyed] heavily on the superstition of fliers.’

Wing Commander Kirkpatrick climbed the three steps to the dais. He was a pre-war regular and his crews liked and trusted him, ‘just the man for any job which would get this damned war over quicker,’ in Dobson’s view. The order of the day that he read out was unlike any other the audience had previously heard. Instead of being given a routine railway junction or gasworks to aim at, the squadron’s mission was directed against a factory twenty miles south-east of Berlin which was believed to be researching experimental weapons. The target was to be completely demolished ‘at all costs’. Should the bombs fail they were to strafe the factory at low level. The success of the mission, he stressed, would obviate great loss of life in the future.

The ‘met’ reports were read out which predicted three storm fronts and blanket cloud over the continent, though this might clear to eight-tenths cover by the time the aircraft arrived giving the captain the option of bombing through the holes in the murk or risking flying below it. The wing commander then went on to confirm what Dobson’s gut had told him. The heavy bomb load meant that it would be touch and go whether there was enough fuel to get them back. The squadron sat ‘entranced and dumb-founded as the words ate like acid into their brain, numbing all senses but that awful emptiness of fear in the stomach.’ They spent the rest of the morning trying to lose themselves in ‘doing those hundred and one … things to keep the mind from death.’ The music on the mess gramophone did nothing to lighten the gloom. Even the liveliest tunes were simply a reminder of a world they might never return to.

At lunch Dobson could not bear to eat. He slipped away early to look over his Wellington, K-Kate. It was raining heavily but he ‘did not pause to collect a greatcoat, feeling somehow that it was superfluous and not in keeping with the dread feeling all around …’ But the weather provided a spurt of hope. ‘I gazed upwards at the lowering clouds whilst the increasing rain stung my pupils and made tiny, salty tears run into my face and aggravated the soreness of my cheeks where I had shaved. Could it be … that ops were scrubbed?’

He ran back to the mess where he met his crew who told him that ops were still very much on. They were coming to the end of their tour and shared his fear of what lay ahead. Speaking on behalf of the rest, the navigator informed Dobson they had decided ‘we are certainly not going to chuck our lives away on this damned death but no glory stunt.’

Dobson went to tell the CO, who came straight to the point. Was Dobson going to join the mutiny? He replied, ‘not without certain trepidation, “no sir.” To see the relief shining in his eyes … was gratitude enough but he rose and patted my shoulder gently, almost fatherly, and said, “Thank you, Dobson.”’

He was allotted a new crew and learned to his dismay that they were ‘sprogs’ straight out of training and virgins when it came to operational flying. He was further alarmed by the discovery that the man flying as ‘second dickey’ or assistant pilot, was an Australian. The prevailing superstition had it that Australians were prone to disaster on their first show.

Dinner was even more depressing than lunch. When they reached the aircraft ‘the rain was falling in an ever-increasing tempo, drumming like bullets on the fuselage.’ Dobson’s misgivings were well-founded. Before they had even crossed the English coast they came under fire from a German intruder. He dived into cloud to escape, emerging in time to see the sky in front twinkling with red stars as the first coastal flak batteries opened up. Dead ahead there was a huge sheet of flame as a bomber exploded. Then it was their turn. Dobson threw the Wellington this way and that ‘but more flak concentrated on us until it seemed as though the whole sky was a mass of flaming, eye-scarring bursts. And the smell like the smell of death itself; cloying, foetid, lingering in … nostrils wide with fear.’ A heavy burst plunged the Wellington into a downward spiral. ‘Completely out of control isn’t fun at any time but in a welter of up-coming flak our predicament was terrible. The crew were in a frenzy, yelling and screaming over the intercom.’ They levelled out at 3,200 feet but were now pinned against the sky by searchlights. Dobson felt ‘the intensity of the beam on one’s face simply sapped the strength from one … the eyes burned like all the fires of hell as I strove to penetrate the terrific vista of light.’

Eventually they left the searchlight batteries behind. They crossed the Dutch border and set course for their objective. Long before they reached Berlin they could see the flak barrage glowing above it. Their target was to the south. As they turned away, two night-fighters bore in on them from ahead and below, riddling the fuselage with tracer. Dobson, a former Hurricane pilot, threw the Wellington into a violent turn, a manoeuvre which had the lucky effect of bringing one attacking Messerschmitt into the front gunner’s sights, just as he was climbing away. ‘Bits began to fly from the fighter as the murderous hail of bullets from the two Brownings, so ably wielded, bit into his fabric, his engines and his tanks … the last we saw of him he was spinning down in a death dive and no pilot got out.’ The other fighter was shaken off in the turn.

They went on. Dobson had to drop through a thick layer of clouds, ‘so solid, so absolutely like a new earth that one wanted to step out on them and walk,’ to have any chance of finding the target. By the time the Wellington emerged only 2,000 feet were showing on the altimeter. Ahead they could see parachute flares, and artillery flashes lit up the target area. Bert Faltham, the navigator-cum-bomb-aimer now took charge. As he led them in the flak increased in intensity until ‘the sky around and ahead was a vast, twinkling maelstrom of light.’ At last Faltham called out, ‘Bombs gone Skip!’ and the Wellington’s 3,500-pound load fell away. Dobson climbed, taking ‘what seemed like a leaden century’ to reach 18,000 feet where he levelled off.

About an hour and a half from home Dobson allowed himself to start thinking that they might just make it. Then the sky ahead reddened with a flak barrage which flared up and died away before he could identify its location. Suddenly there was ‘a terrific crack, like a whip going hard against naked flesh, whilst a gale roared through the hole the flak had created … a nucleus of bursts held us in their thrall, smashing into the fuselage at every point, tearing huge gaps …’ For the next forty-five minutes Dobson fought to keep the aircraft steady but it started to slide into what seemed like a final descent. He gave the order to bale out. ‘One by one the crew filed past my seat and dropped through the opening at my feet. When the last one … had vanished I trimmed Kate, tail heavy, so that in a few moments her nose would come up and she would spin in to her complete destruction. Then, still holding the stick, I slid from my seat and as the aircraft swayed slowly backwards I fell forward through the hole in the manner approved. The time was 05.00 … Height 1,500 feet.’¹²

Such was the end of K-Kate, one of thirty-seven aircraft lost that night. Peirse’s determination to restore his and his command’s reputation had brought disaster. Two months later he was removed. The Berlin calamity prompted the War Cabinet to put an end to big raids for the rest of the winter to preserve lives and aircraft and allow the new policy to take shape. In the coming months only limited operations with small numbers of aircraft were sanctioned. It was to be another fourteen months before Berlin was attacked again.

6 Enter ‘Butch’

Though it might not have appeared so to despondent crews that winter, Bomber Command’s overall prospects were slowly improving. The Bomber Boys rarely caught a glimpse of the big picture. But during the second half of 1941 the wider war had taken on a new and encouraging direction. The German invasion of Russia in June had transformed the Soviet Union from an enemy to an ally. With the entry of the United States into the conflict after the 7 December attack on Pearl Harbor, all the riches of America were unlocked for use in the fight against the Nazis.

The pause in major operations ordered after the Berlin disaster gave an exhausted, depleted and dispirited force the chance to catch its breath and gather its strength. Over the months that followed the recent volunteers started to arrive in force at their operational squadrons. The first of the new generation of four-engined heavies, the Stirlings and Halifaxes, began to replace their two-engined predecessors. On Christmas Eve, 1941, the first of the Lancasters landed at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. Soon its blunt, menacing lines would be seen everywhere. Some of the new aircraft carried desperately-needed new electronic navigation aids. By the time Harris took over Bomber Command at the end of February 1942 the force was approaching a position where it could start applying the policies on which those running the war were now agreed.

Shortly before his arrival there was an event which gave heart to the battered squadrons. One day in early March 1942, Peter Johnson visited a bomber station in Nottinghamshire to have lunch with the base commander. Entering the mess he found a group of young officers in the middle of a raucous party. His host explained they were celebrating a ‘wizard prang’ the night before. ‘Come and look at the photos,’ he said. ‘They’re the best ever. Teach those bloody Frogs to play along with the Boche.’

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