Men of Air: The Courage and Sacrifice of Bomber Command in World War II

427 Pages·2019·17.02 MB·English

by  Kevin Wilson

MEN
—OF—
AIR
THE COURAGE AND SACRIFICE OF BOMBER COMMAND
* IN WORLD WAR II *
KEVIN WILSON
To Declan, Julia, Nicholas and Martin
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Prelude
WINTER
1 An Op Too Many
2 The Cauldron
3 The Cost of Courage
4 The Lesson of Leipzig
5 Revenge and Recrimination
6 Berlin or Bust
7 The Underground Air War
8 Massacre in the Moonlight
SPRING
9 Making a Mark
10 Escape Lines in the Railway Desert
11 Training and Terror
12 Return to the Reich
SUMMER
13 The Longest Night
14 Squashing the Doodlebug
15 Throttling the Luftwaffe
16 One-way Tickets in the Transportation Plan
17 Back to Basics
18 The Beginning of the End
19 Reflection
Notes
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
SECTION ONE
1. The crew of P/O Jim Catlin, who brought their Lancaster into a crash landing at Manston after it had
been shot up by a night fighter on the Leipzig raid in February (Private collection)
2. The happy crew of F/Sgt Bill Yates outside their spartan Nissen hut at East Kirkby. (Private collection)
3. LACW Dorothy Mason, the teleprinter operator at RAF Bardney. (Private collection)
4. Sgt Kenneth Dobbs volunteered for the Nuremberg raid and was shot down, being pulled from the
wreckage of his Halifax. (Private collection)
5. F/Sgt Don Gray, whose aircraft exploded on the Nuremberg operation. (Private collection)
6. W/O Lawrence Woolliscroft, whose Lancaster was also lost on the raid. (Private collection)
7. The international crew of F/O Jim Lord mark the end of their tour at North Killingholme. (Private
collection)
8. Releasing the tension: the crew of 83 Sqn skipper P/O Alan Edgar fool around outside their billet.
(Private collection)
9. Navigator F/O Jim Wright, who nearly lost an arm from frostbite, pictured with crew members and
ground staff at East Kirkby in the spring of 1944. (Private collection)
10. Evader F/O Bob Farnbank with a French Resistance woman, and three USAAF flyers, outside the
Normandy farmhouse. (Private collection)
11. Evader Harry Fisher. (Private collection)
12. S/Ldr Gordon Carter and his skipper S/Ldr Julian Sale, who were shot down in February. (Private
collection)
13. Great Escaper S/Ldr Jimmy James as a POW. (Private collection)
14. S/Ldr Steve Cockbain poses for the press the day after bringing home his damaged Lancaster from the
Wesseling raid in June after ordering four of his crew to bale out. Inset is one of them, W/O Albert
Bracegirdle, whose picture was taken by the Luftwaffe. (Private collection)
15. The Fillingham crew celebrate the end of a tour on 101 Sqn. (Private collection)
16. WAAF driver Marian Smith, pictured with a friend at Kirmington. (Private collection)
17. Flight engineer Ron Brown. (Private collection)
18. W/O Harry Ball, wearing the Caterpillar Club emblem beneath his signaller’s brevet for a successful
bale-out. (Private collection).
19. W/O Roy Ollerhead. (Private collection)
20. Canadian F/O Don Cheney with the crew of 617 Sqn’s ‘Dark Victor’. (Private collection)
21. F/O Rhys Thomas lines up with his crew and ground crew in front of their Lancaster at North
Killingholme, the day after finishing their tour in September. (Private collection)
22. The 9 Sqn crew of Australian S/Ldr James Hancock at RAF Bardney. (Private collection)
SECTION TWO
23. A Dornier D0217 about to take off to engage British bombers. The D0217 was one of the first German
night fighters to be equipped with the deadly Schräge Musik upward-firing cannon. (SV-Bilderdienst)
24. The result of tracerless Schräge Musik: a bomber explodes. This official picture was printed in the
Daily Express, in April 1944, the claim it was a German ‘Scarecrow’ shell, which the RAF told aircrew
were fired to simulate doomed aircraft. In fact there were no ‘Scarecrow’ shells, only exploding
bombers. (Private collection)
25. The dawn of 31 January 1944 in a typical Berlin street hours after approximately 2,000 tons of bombs
had fallen on the Reich capital in less than fifteen minutes. (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
26. A bomb aimer crouches over his sight in the nose of a Lancaster, his head surrounded by the glow of a
burning German city as he prepares to release his load. (Private collection)
27. The devastation in the centre of Munich after the highly accurate raid of 24 April. (SV-Bilderdienst)
28. Bombs from higher-flying Lancasters have hit this Halifax over a V-weapon site in France in July
1944, removing part of its tailplane. (AKG Images)
29. There were dangers even without meeting the enemy for Bomber Command airmen, ten percent of
whom died in training. This Lancaster of 35 Sqn crashed on take-off at Graveley in July, It was the
favoured aircraft of F/Lt Harold Hoover, who returned from leave to find his much-loved C-Charlie
wrecked. (Private collection)
30. A Doodlebug arrives near Drury Lane in mid-July. (Topfoto)
31. and 32. The raid on the Panzer training base at Mailly-le-Camp cost forty-two Lancasters, 11.6 per cent
of the force which set out, but the camp was wrecked. Above: the repair sheds and billets of the 21st
Panzer Group before the attack; and below, afterwards. (Imperial War Museum)
33. The Nazi hierarchy forced inmates of local concentration camps to dispose of unexploded bombs after
bombing attacks. Here such prisoners are seen digging in the rubble after the heavy raid on Bremen in
August 1944. (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
34. Stuttgart was devastated in three heavy raids in July, particularly the night of 2 5/2 6, in which the
centre of the old city southwest of the main station, as shown here, was virtually destroyed. (National
Archives)
35. The three raids also left their mark on the RAF. Pictured is the Halifax of F/Lt Jim Weaver of 102 Sqn
shot up by a nightfighter on the way back from the first operation of 24/25 July. The aircraft is leaning
to port because of a bullet-ridden tyre, which caused it to groundloop on landing. (Private collection)
List of Maps
1. Route to Berlin, 24/25 March 1944
2. Route to and from Nuremberg, 30/31 March 1944
3. Plot of bombs on Munich, 24/25 April 1944
4. Major railway targets before D-Day
5. Route in and out of Mailly-le-Camp, 3/4 May
6. Plot of bombs on Stuttgart, 25/26 July 1944
‘When we first arrived on 101 Sqn the intelligence officer told us:
“You’re now on an operational squadron, your expectation of life is
six weeks. Go back to your huts and make out your wills.” It was
simply accepted that two out of three of us would be killed.’
Sgt Dennis Goodliffe, a 19-year-old flight engineer, who completed a
thirty-three-operation tour in sixteen weeks in the spring and summer
of 1944.
Prelude
A
s always for those who waited in the night across the flat fields of bomber
country, the first faint droning they now heard in the southern sky was both
welcome and worrying. First came relief at hearing the young heroes of the night
return from raiding Germany, then the nagging question of how many there
would be. In this particular, frosty dawn such anguish was acute. For this was
the end of the first raid in 1944 in the Battle of Berlin, a campaign that was
draining the lifeblood from Bomber Command.
As the Lancasters descended in the darkness, lurching up England’s eastern
edge, pilots and bomb aimers peered fretfully into the gloom for the first
uncertain glimmer of navigation beacons. Airframes creaked, whistled and
whispered, advertising fresh flak holes from the target all crews feared.
Engineers tapped fuel gauges and anxiously eyed oil temperatures as the ragged
armada thundered on, swinging ever deeper into the blackness. And slowly, as
altimeters wound back, the sense of unspoken unity that had kept this loose
gaggle of airmen linked across miles of sky was lost. Now each individually
coded contributor to the cacophony sought its own airfield. It was then that the
reverberation of their passing rattled slates in sleepy villages as the Lancasters
began the closing letdown to base, debriefing and fuggy billet.
On the airfields WAAF drivers waited by their trucks to pick up crews from
dispersal, intelligence officers sharpened pencils and wits to pick from weary
airmen the latest clues to Luftwaffe tactics, and beaming chaplains stood poised
in ops rooms by tea urn and rum jar to dispense warmth and comfort for tension-
stretched nerves. Crews not flying that night stirred beneath rough blankets at
the sound of bombers touching, then gratefully holding, the glistening concrete
of the stretching runway. First elements of the force of 421 bombers that had
struggled into the overcast at midnight, turned off the flarepath and trundled,
power plants popping, into the open arms of dispersal bays and shut down. Hot