HEROES ALL: Veteran Airmen of Different Nationalities Tell Their Stories of Service in the Second World War

481 Pages·2010·5.85 MB·English

by  Steve Bond

Published by
Grub Street
4 Rainham Close
London SW11 6SS
Copyright © Grub Street 2010
Copyright text © Dr Steve Bond 2010
Copyright foreword © Air Marshal Sir Roger Austin KCB AFC FRAeS
RAF
2010
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bond, Steve.
Heroes all : airmen of different nationalities tell their stories of service in
the Second World War.
1. World War, 1939-1945--Aerial operations. 2. World War, 1939-1945--
Personal narratives.
I. Title
940.5’44’0922-dc22
ISBN-13: 9781906502713
eISBN: 9781908117861
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Publishing only uses
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CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction & Acknowledgements
Chapter One Enlistment
Chapter Two Training Days
Chapter Three Defence – the Fighters
Chapter Four Offence – Bomber Boys
Chapter Five The Lonely Sea
Chapter Six The Eastern Front
Chapter Seven Mediterranean & Far East Theatres
Chapter Eight Night Fighters!
Chapter Nine Transports
Chapter Ten They Also Served
Chapter Eleven D-Day to VJ-Day
References
Abbreviations
Select Bibliography
FOREWORD
AIR MARSHAL SIR ROGER AUSTIN
KCB AFC FRAES RAF (RET’D)
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the
past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and
kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.
Winston Churchill
The history of air warfare is well documented because every take-off,
every landing and every engagement of the enemy was logged and
recorded. That record of action is generally accurate and comprehensive
but statistics alone do not tell the full story. To complete the picture, eye-
witness accounts are invaluable as they bring the story to life by
illustrating the tension, the emotions and the atmosphere surrounding the
events.
Steve Bond has done a remarkable job in gathering the tales of over 100
people from the armies, navies and air forces of six nations, both aircrew
and ground crew, plus civilians such as Alex Henshaw. He has sensibly
avoided the temptation to edit their contributions, thus preserving the very
personal nature of their accounts which reveal their characters and the
differing approaches of the various nations.
The result is a compelling and fascinating compilation of stories from
every area of air warfare which add so much to the bare statistics. This is a
first class book which will be a most useful reference for anyone with an
interest in the history of air warfare.
INTRODUCTION &
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
HEROES
Hero: “A man distinguished by extraordinary valour and
martial achievements; one who does brave or noble deeds; an
illustrious warrior.”
Oxford English Dictionary
In the world of the 21st century it has become commonplace to refer to
high achievers in almost every walk of modern life as heroes. One only
has to turn to the sports pages of our daily newspapers to find the term
applied to, for example, footballers who have saved their national team
from disgracing itself against the opposition. Worthy though such
endeavours may well be, turn back the clock sixty years or more, and the
common meaning of the term was very different and indeed little used.
Then, young men – and women – of a similar tender age to today’s
sporting stars were fighting a very different kind of campaign, with far
more serious, almost unimaginable, potential consequences for both
themselves and their losing side. A 2007 study of the United Kingdom
premier football league revealed that the average age of the team players
at that time was a little over twenty-six years[1]. The average age of
crewmen in Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command during the Second
World War was just twenty-two. An airman in his mid to late twenties
was often referred to by his comrades as ‘the old man’, while at the other
extreme, the youngest airman to lose his life during the Battle of Britain,
air gunner AC2 Norman Jacobson, was just eighteen when he died during
the late evening of his very first day of operations on Blenheim-equipped
29 Squadron. His body was recovered a day later and buried at sea, and he
is commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial. Today such fresh-faced
youngsters, hardly out of school, are again making the supreme sacrifice
in conflicts in far-flung places like Afghanistan.
The toll in human lives throughout the Second World War was
enormous. In Bomber Command alone, 55,573 airmen lost their lives in
action, out of a total of 70,253 casualties for the entire RAF. Similarly,
Luftwaffe losses, which will probably never be known for certain,
amounted to 96,917 up to the end of 1944, after which no reliable records
remain, even if they were completed. United States Air Force (USAF)
records indicate 79,265 killed in action in just the European theatre of
operations (ETO).
Looking back, the first wartime heroes I came across were during my
school days in the 1960s. At that time, only a decade and a half after the
end of the war, there was not the intense interest in that conflict that is so
prevalent today, so those who had been there perhaps tended not to be
paid much attention. At my school, the master who was the officer in
charge of the RAF section of our combined cadet force, one N H ‘Blanco’
(inevitably) White had been, so I later found out, a pilot during the war,
while my English master, John Perfect, a very quiet and unassuming man,
had been one of those incredibly brave souls in the Glider Pilot Regiment
who had flown Horsas into Arnhem. Again, this fact was not widely
known, I recall being told about it by another boy one day, and was only
able to confirm it recently. Sadly, in the intervening years, John Perfect
had died; how I would have loved to have talked to him about his role in
that momentous event.
In recent years there have been many books published that have included
the thoughts and memories of those who were there. Hearing the airmen
bring to life such well-known events as the Battle of Britain, the bomber
war, the air war on the Eastern Front, as well as lesser-known aspects, is a
privilege not granted to many today. This is not just because the veterans
are reluctant to talk about their experiences; often I have found that they
need to be persuaded that the listener is genuinely interested – they worry
about boring us! Today, the survivors of the armed forces that took part in
that great conflict are all elderly and they are rapidly fading away. Yet still
they retain almost to a man, a remarkable degree of self-effacement, and
during my many visits to interview them, the conversation frequently
starts with something along the lines of: “Oh, I didn’t do very much.” As
former Warrant Officer Jack Bromfield of 158 Squadron put it:
“The memories are still there; they’re there all the time. You can go
maybe two weeks and think nothing; there’s a little snippet in the paper
or on the television and suddenly it all starts to wind up again. Or
somebody mentions a name, you’ve forgotten about him for years, and
suddenly you remember about him.”
Occasionally too, a subliminal feeling of guilt can be detected; not, by any
means, guilt at what they were called upon to do, but guilt that they had
survived when their comrades did not. There is rarely any political aside
to their stories and for me, this attitude is best summed up by something
written by the renowned Luftwaffe night-fighter ace Major Heinrich Prinz
zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who scored eighty-three victories against allied
bombers, but failed to survive the war. The following passage appears in
his biography Laurels for Prinz Wittgenstein written by fellow officer
Werner Roell[2]:
“We soldiers are not born to politicise. That is not consistent with our
duty…We go into battle trusting in the justice of our action. Let
someone tell me that, in the middle of a battle, he can evaluate what
the political leadership has ordered. We are too close to events to have
the same insight as our superiors into the sense or nonsense, and
therefore into the right, and wrong, of things…Discipline is the most
pious virtue.
“We soldiers entered an order, whose vow is obedience. One cannot
fight the battle half-heartedly. How clear and self evident it is for us in
the front line. The orders are clear. It runs: To prevent enemy attacks
by night on our towns. No more and no less.”
Having decided that I wanted to meet as many of the veterans as possible,
and as my sound archive started to build-up, I became increasingly aware
that many more of these stories were crying out for a wider audience. The
other remarkable discovery was just how coincidental and closely-related
many experiences turned out to be. I have spoken to British and German,
German and Russian, and British and Italian veterans, who it transpired,
all shared the same piece of sky at the same time; still with us despite the
passing of so many years. I had somehow managed in a sense, to bring
them back together – in one or two cases actually culminating in face-to-
face meetings.
This is not a book about the rights and wrongs of war; neither does it
discuss the strategies of the various military commanders in order to
explain why airmen were doing what they were. The intent is simply to
explore the experiences and feelings of those people in the front line
charged with the delivery of whatever the strategy was. I have also tried to
look at all aspects of their service careers, from enlistment, through
training and operations right through to de-mobilisation.
This then, I decided, was to be the main thrust of the work, to take key
campaigns of the air war in the various theatres, or even single remarkable
events, and examine them from both sides as far as possible. I also felt it
was important that the less ‘glamorous’ sides of service life should not be
ignored, so I have included such aspects as selection, training, aircraft
ferrying and so on; not of course forgetting those vital unsung heroes (that
word again), the ground crew, without whom the air war could simply not
have taken place. It must be remembered that most of these men and
women were not long out of school, so trying to keep some sort of
normality in their lives resulted in some fairly lively interludes away from
their operational roles, and these too are included to illustrate further the
human side behind the uniform.
I also took the deliberate decision not to edit their words, since to do so
would be a breach of faith and would also carry the risk of imposing my
hindsight beliefs on theirs. So I simply put each set of stories in context
with an overview of where the reader will find his or herself in time
through the pages that follow. I have however, added a few explanatory
notes here and there where perhaps something has slipped the airman’s
memory, or where I am able to add to information that he simply did not
have at his disposal.
The result is a series of snapshots in time. Over the last twenty years or
more, I have accumulated many, many hours of recordings and a great
deal of correspondence, far too much to make use of it all in this book, but
I have done my very best to ensure that I have done justice to each
contributor, and presented their contribution appropriately. Sadly of
course, many of them have passed on since I started this project, and I
thank each and every one of them. They all gave freely of their time, often
with gusto, always with enthusiasm.
Those listed below are all the veterans with whom I have had contact,
mostly directly, or in a few cases, such as the Russian pilots, through
intermediary family members or fellow-enthusiasts who have been
tremendously helpful in solving issues of distance and language. Other
airmen quoted in the text have been sourced elsewhere and are
appropriately referenced.
Ladies and gentlemen, we owe you a debt that can never be repaid; I
salute you all.