Lancaster and the Tirpitz: The Story of the Legendary Bomber and How it Sunk

242 Pages·2011·2.82 MB·English

by  Iveson

SQUADRON LEADER
TONY IVESON
DFC, FORMER PILOT, 617 SQUADRON (“THE DAMBUSTERS”)
AND
BRIAN MILTON

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The verses from ‘Friends Ain’t Supposed to Die When They’re Young’ from Billy Bishop
Goes to War are reproduced by kind permission of John Maclachlan Gray and Eric
Peterson.
Lie in the Dark and Listen is reproduced by kind permission of the Noël Coward Estate.
We had a great deal of help from the following people and organisations, without whose
insight, kindness and attention we would not have been able to write this book. We hope
they feel that it was worth the effort: Nigel Baldwin, Reg Barker, Alex Beetham, Sir
Michael Beetham, John Bell, David Birch, Philip Birtles, Stan Bradford, Don Briggs, Jim
Brookman, Eric Brown, Tony Butler, Charles Clarke, Geoffrey Claridge, Peter Clegg,
Peter Collins, Dennis Cooper, Gerald Coulson, Seb Cox, Colin Cruddas, Lettice Curtis, Sir
John Curtiss, Jim Dooley, Patrick Dorehill, Rolf Ebhardt, Peter Elliot, David Fellowes,
Michael Fopp, Benny Goodman, Ray Grayston, George Hart, Michael Hedgeland, Julian
Hellebrand, Jim Heyworth, Henry Horscroft, Robert Horsley, Colin Hudson, Fred
Hulance, George Johnson, John Langston, Rosemary Lapham, Michael Leckie, Stephen
Lewis, the Lincolnshire Lancaster Society, Grant McDonald, Robert Mason, John
Maynard, Les Munro, Jim Norris, Rupert Noye, Heinz Orlowski, Rob Owen, Fred &
Harold Panton, Harold Penrose, Al Pinner, Dennis Potter, the Press Association, Douglas
Radcliffe, RAF Club, RAF News, Andrew Renwick, Clive Richards, Kurt Schulze,
Vincent Stanley,
Fred ‘Doc’ Sutherland, Michael Turner, Eric Verdon-Roe, Rob Wiffen, Jinny Wootton.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Sir Michael Beetham
Chapter One: Tirpitz – The Threat
Chapter Two: Birth of a Fighter Pilot
Chapter Three: The Tirpitz – Two Attacks
Chapter Four: The Birth of Avro
Chapter Five: Last Witnesses, Two Avro Boys and Eleven Lancaster VCs
Chapter Six: The RAF, Schneider Trophy and the Merlin Engine
Chapter Seven: The Locust Years to War
Chapter Eight: Birth of the Manchester
Chapter Nine: The Short Unhappy Life of the Manchester
Chapter Ten: Boy, Oh Boy – What an Aircraft!
Chapter Eleven: The Wider War
Chapter Twelve: Pathfinders and Hamish Mahaddie, Bennett’s ‘Horse Thief’
Chapter Thirteen: The Dambusters
Chapter Fourteen: The Ruhr, Hamburg, Peenemunde and Tirpitz
Chapter Fifteen: The Boffins’ War
Chapter Sixteen: Bomber Command’s Darkest Hour – Battle of Berlin
Chapter Seventeen: Morale, Courage and Air Warfare
Chapter Eighteen: German Defences
Chapter Nineteen: Last Year of the War and Special Ops
Chapter Twenty: Sinking the Tirpitz
Chapter Twenty-One: Lancasters at War’s End
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Lancaster vs the Halifax
Chapter Twenty-Three: That Shining Sword
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Bergen Incident
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Bomber Command Memorial
Postscript by Brian Milton
Statistics
Bibliography
Picture Credits
List of Illustrations
Author Tony Iveson aged 23, then a flight lieutenant, just back from Africa and about to take the conversion
course for the Lancaster.
The Avro Manchester, which had a ‘short, unhappy life’, became the father of the four-engined Lancaster.
A Lancaster prototype, all turrets fitted, is a familiar sight but when it first appeared Spitfires tried to shoot it
down and Germans on the ground cheered, thinking it was one of theirs.
A Lancaster production line in England, which could deliver up to 26 brand new aircraft a week. There was
also a Lancaster production line in Canada.
Wireless Operator, behind the navigator and in front of the Lancaster main spar, ‘a very cramped position’.
Lancaster pilot, with instrument panel. Compared to twenty-first century aircraft they were actually very
simple. Note the armour plate behind the pilot’s head – absolutely non-effective against 20mm cannon
rounds.
Wing Commander Guy Gibson, 24, led 19 Lancasters of 617 ‘Dambuster’ Squadron to attack three great dams,
successfully breaching two of them – Mohne and Eder – despite losing eight aircraft. Gibson is the pilot most
associated with the Lancaster. He was awarded the VC, DSO*, DFC* and was killed flying a Mosquito later
in the war.
Sergeant Norman Cyril Jackson, 24, flight engineer, 106 Squadron. Attacked by a fighter, his Lancaster was set
ablaze at 22,000ft. Jackson climbed out on the wing in a 200mph slipstream to try to put out the flames. He
was pulled off the aircraft by his burning parachute but survived the fall to win the VC.
Flight Lieutenant Bill Reid, 22, 61 Squadron. Shot up twice, losing blood from a number of wounds and with
dead and dying crewmen on board, flew 200 miles to bomb his target successfully. Despite fainting from loss
of blood, he landed safely back in England. Awarded the VC and survived the war.
Flying Officer Leslie Manser, 20, pilot, 50 Squadron. Shot to pieces in Harris’s first ‘1,000 bomber raid’,
Manser held his crippled Manchester steady – with one engine shot away and the other failing – so that his
crew could bail out. Unable to escape himself, he died when the aircraft went down. He was awarded the
posthumous VC.
Squadron Leader John Deering Nettleton, 24, 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron led 12 Lancasters on the low-level
Augsburg raid. Seven of the aircraft were shot down but the U-Boat engine factory was successfully bombed.
Nettleton survived, the press hailing him as the ‘Roof-Top VC.’ He was killed later in the war.
Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, 27, ‘the legend’, completed 100 missions in four years of fighting.
Typically, in a single operation, he would dive to 1,000ft over the hottest German targets to ensure accurate
marking, remaining under withering fire for 12 minutes. He was awarded the VC, DSO**, DFC*, later OM
and became a Peer.
Squadron Leader Ian Bazalgette, 25, Master Bomber, 635 PFF Squadron. Bombed one target with two engines
shot away and his aircraft on fire. He held the aircraft steady while four of his crew bailed out. Instead of
jumping himself, he crash-landed to avoid a French village and to try to save two wounded crewmen. The
Lancaster exploded. He was awarded the posthumous VC.
Pilot Officer Andrew Mynarski, 27, mid-upper gunner, 419 RCAF Squadron. When a night fighter set his
Lancaster on fire, the pilot ordered the crew to bail out. Mynarski was severely burned trying to rescue the
rear gunner, trapped in his turret. He only jumped, his clothes and parachute on fire, when all efforts failed.
He saluted the rear gunner before exiting the aircraft but did not survive. The rear gunner did, however, and
told of Mynarski’s bravery, leading to his posthumous VC.
Flight Sergeant George Thompson, 24, wireless operator, 9 Squadron. Thompson suffered terrible burns
rescuing two crewmen from the flames on board his burning Lancaster, beating out the fire with his bare
hands. The aircraft successfully crash-landed in Holland. One of the rescued crewmen survived, but
Thompson died from his injuries and was awarded the posthumous VC.
Captain Edwin Swales, 29, SAAF Master Bomber, 582 Squadron. Swales ignored repeated fighter attacks and
the loss of two engines to ensure that his force accurately pressed home a raid, then held his Lancaster steady
while his crew bailed out. He was found dead at the controls of his crashed aircraft and awarded the
posthumous VC.
Squadron Leader Robert Palmer, 24, Master Bomber, 109 PFF Squadron, with 110 ops under his belt, he
ignored two engines and his bomb bay on fire to continue his bombing run, accurately to set markers for the
rest of the force before falling in flames. He was awarded the posthumous VC.
More than 150,000 Rolls Royce Merlin engines were built, to be used in aircraft as diverse as the Spitfire,
Hurricane, Mustang, Mosquito, Halifax and Lancaster. Initially the 27-litre engine developed 1,000 hp, but
by the end of the war that had increased to 1,600 hp.
A Lancaster being loaded with mines for a mine-laying operation known as ‘Gardening’. Parachutes at one end
of the mines opened as they were dropped over the sea. Note the Avro Manchester in the background.
Lancasters of 44 Squadron, based at Waddington, Lincolnshire, pictured in September 1942. They are flown by
Sergeant Colin Watt, Royal Australian Air Force; Pilot Officer T G Hackney, who was later killed while
serving with 83 Squadron; and Pilot Officer J D V S Stephens DFM, who was killed with his crew two nights
later during a raid on Wismar.
Loading a ‘cookie’, a 4,000lb ‘blockbuster’ bomb, with no stabilising fins and a thin skin, designed to blow the
roofs off buildings so that incendiaries dropped with them would cause fires. Some later ‘cookies’ weighed
12,000lbs and could only be carried by Lancasters.
Guy Gibson’s ‘Dambuster’ Lancaster, G-George, fitted with Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb for the Dams Raid.
Note calliper arms that enabled Gibson’s flight engineer Sergeant John Pulford to start the bomb spinning
before his Australian bomb aimer, Flight Officer ‘Spam’ Spafford dropped it from 60ft.
Tirpitz dashed from the German port of Kiel to Foetten Fjord, on 16 January 1942, the first of a number of
Norwegian fjords in which she hid throughout the rest of the war. Churchill estimated that crippling her was
worth ‘100 British aircraft and 500 men’.
‘The Beast at bay’, surrounded by anti-torpedo nets, hidden under the looming cliffs of a secluded Norwegian
fjord, constantly threatened by RAF and Royal Navy aircraft. Just the threat of Tirpitz raising steam could
change Allied tactics all across the Atlantic.
The ‘Grand Slam’ Lancaster with no mid-upper or rear turret, fully strengthened main spar to carry the 22,000-
pound bomb, strengthened undercarriage and bomb bay. The bomb was so expensive that, if not used in
anger, it could not be jettisoned as there were so few of them. The girth of the bomb was so wide that the
bomb-bay doors had to be taken off.
Gerald Coulson’s famous painting, now hanging in RAF College Cranwell, of the sinking of the Tirpitz on 12
November 1944. It was by chance that Coulson chose F-Fox – the author’s Lancaster – as the central feature
of the picture, dropping the 12,000lb Tallboy bomb.
The crew of M-Mike immediately after landing in Sumburgh on 12 January 1945 following the Bergen raid.
From left, navigator Jack Harrison, flight engineer Desmond ‘Taffy’ Phillips, the author/pilot, and bomb-
aimer Frank Chance. Note the damage to the port fin after Heinz Orlowski’s attack. M-Mike never flew
again.
Oberleutnant Kurt Schulze, one of our Last Witnesses, was 23 in 1944 and Adjutant to 9 Staffel, III Gruppe,
Jagdeschwader 5 (Fighter Wing), the ‘Eismeerjaeger’. His unique story of why two of Germany’s greatest
fighter ‘aces’ – with 320 kills between them – did not shoot down the 617 and 9 Squadron Lancasters, on the
third Tirpitz raid.
The Avro Lincoln, the larger, more powerful successor to the Lancaster. More than 600 were built, although it
came too late for war service. It was the last piston-engined bomber ordered by the RAF. The author flew a
Lincoln from England to Argentina in 1947, to deliver it to the Argentine Air Force.
One of 30 Lancastrian 15-seat airliners delivered to BOAC in 1945. On a demonstration flight G-ALGF flew
13,500 miles from England to Auckland, NZ, in three days, 14 hours, at an average speed of 220 mph.
Mostly suited for mail and VIP passengers, Lancastrians flew until the 1960s. The author flew this particular
aicraft between the Middle East and the UK.
Pictured during one of ten refuellings to take place on 7 August 1949 over Bristol, Devon and Dungeness, one
of Sir Alan Cobham’s Flight Re-Fuelling Lancastrians (flown by Tom Marks) helps a Meteor 3 jet fighter
(flown by Pat Hornidge) to become the first jet aircraft to make a non-stop flight of more than 12 hours (+1
minute!)
The Avro Shackleton, grandson of the Lancaster through the Avro Lincoln, was employed by the RAF on
maritime reconnaissance. A total of 185 Shackletons, fitted with tricycle undercarriages, were built and served
with the RAF and the South African Air Force. The last RAF Shackleton retired in 1990. It has been described
as ‘a hundred thousand rivets flying in close formation.’
The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight – Spitfire, Lancaster and Hurricane – over Buckingham Palace on 8 May,
2005, the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe.