Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next

Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next John Nichol Previously published as After the Flood.Former RAF Tornado Navigator and Gulf War veteran John Nichol sets out on a personal journey to discover what happened to 617 Squadron after the flood.The role RAF 617 Squadron in the destruction of the dams at the heart of the industrial Ruhr has been celebrated in book, magazine and film for more than seventy years.On the 17th May 1943, 133 airmen set out in 19 Lancasters to destroy the M?hne, Eder and Sorpe dams. 56 of them did not return. Despite these catastrophic losses, the raid became an enormous propaganda triumph. The survivors were feted as heroes and became celebrities of their time.They had been brought together for one specific task – so what happened next? Of the 77 men who made it home from that raid, 32 would lose their lives later in the war and only 45 survived to see the victory for which they fought.Few are aware of the extent of the Dambuster squadron’s operations after the Dams Raid. They became the ‘go to’ squadron for specialist precision attacks, dropping the largest bombs ever built on battleships, railway bridges, secret weapon establishments, rockets sites and U-boat construction pens. They were involved in attempts on the lives of enemy leaders, both Hitler and Mussolini, created a ‘false fleet’ on D-day which fooled the Germans, and knocked out a German super gun which would have rained 600 shells an hour on London.In ‘After The Flood’, John Nichol retraces the path of 617 Squadron’s most dangerous sorties as their reputation called them into action again and again. Copyright (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com) First published in Great Britain as After the Flood by William Collins in 2015 Text © John Nichol 2015 John Nichol 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. Cover photographs © Fox Photos/Stringer (men); Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com) (plane, clouds) All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008100315 Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008100865 Version: 2016-05-18 Dedication (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) For Sophie This book is dedicated to all the members of 617 Squadron, on the ground and in the air, who served during the Second World War with such courage and fortitude. Their sacrifice will never be forgotten. Contents Cover (#ufa4fe0d2-ae68-5640-8dc3-57fcefa7e80b) Title Page (#u49ac9227-f7fa-5c0d-9c8f-3585a5a5e9c2) Copyright Dedication Maps (#u014830cd-801a-52d3-9224-81e45384997e) Author’s Note 1. The Dams 2. What Next? 3. Press On, Regardless 4. Death or Glory 5. Spring 1944 6. The End of the Beginning 7. The Fight Goes On 8. Terror Weapons 9. Mac’s Gone! 10. Life and Death on 617 Squadron 11. The Beast 12. ‘What Have You Been Doing Today?’ 13. Back to the Tirpitz 14. The Last Christmas? 15. The Final Days 16. Counting the Cost Picture Section Notes Sources and Bibliography Picture Credits Index Acknowledgements About the Author Also by John Nichol About the Publisher Author’s Note (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) ‘Apr?s moi, le d?luge …’ King Louis XV’s last words became the motto of the most famous bomber squadron in history – 617 Squadron RAF – the Dambusters. Their role in Operation Chastise – the attack on the M?hne, Eder and Sorpe dams at the heart of the industrial Ruhr valley on 17 May 1943 – has been celebrated in print and on screen for more than seventy years. But what 617 Squadron did in the aftermath of this iconic raid is far less well known. 617 Squadron was a specialist squadron, formed from some of the RAF’s most brilliant and experienced aircrews for one specific task: breaching the dams. However, British commanders were soon finding other targets for their elite Dambusting squadron, and it was to play the lead role in a series of much less well-known but almost equally eye-catching attacks that destroyed some of the Nazis’ most deadly weapons and wrecked key parts of Germany’s industrial infrastructure. 617 Squadron’s devastating raids caught the imagination, raised the morale of the British public and made headlines around the world. More important, they also helped to tip the balance of hostilities in the Allies’ favour, saved countless thousands of lives and arguably contributed to shortening the war. CHAPTER 1 (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) The Dams (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) A 617 Squadron Lancaster takes off for the iconic raid on the German dams During the dark days of 1940, 1941 and the early part of 1942, when the British public had been forced to swallow an unremitting diet of blood, sweat, tears, toil and gloom, the RAF and Bomber Command had offered almost the only glimmers of hope. Despite the propaganda spin, while the evacuation of Dunkirk reduced the scale of disaster, it was a disaster nonetheless. British defeats by the Afrika Korps on the battlefields of North Africa and by the Japanese in the Far East – where the surrender at Singapore on 15 February 1942 was not just the greatest humiliation in Britain’s military history, but the moment from which the end of Empire could be said to have begun – continued the string of military reverses. Only in the air, where RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes had defeated the German bombers in the Battle of Britain and Bomber Command was relentlessly taking the war to Germany’s industrial cities, could Britain be said to be on the offensive. In late 1942, the victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein ending on 3 November, and the lifting of the Siege of Malta on 11 December, coupled with new tactics at sea which were reducing, though not eliminating, the U-boat menace, suggested the military tide might finally be beginning to turn, but Britain’s commanders and people still looked to the air for proof that Germany was paying the price for its aggression. A four-month bombing campaign against the cities of the Ruhr, aiming to pulverise and paralyse the heavy industries based there and so to disrupt Germany’s war production, had begun on 5 February 1943 with the bombing of Essen. But arguably, the most crucial targets were the string of dams in the hills flanking the Ruhr. They not only generated some of the power the heavy industries required, but also supplied drinking water to the population, pure water for steel-making and other industrial processes, and the water that fed the canal system on which the Ruhr depended, both to move raw materials to the factories and to carry finished products – aircraft parts, tanks, guns and munitions – away from them. However, attempts by Main Force – as the squadrons carrying out mass bombing raids in Bomber Command were known – to attack small targets with the required accuracy had so far proved ineffective. Where the requirement was for saturation bombing over a broad area, Main Force could be brutally effective, as the thousand-bomber raid that devastated Cologne at the end of May 1942 had already demonstrated. But regular success in bombing individual targets – particularly if they were as difficult to access and as ferociously defended as the dams – had proved elusive. Attacks by torpedo bombers like the Bristol Beaufort and the Fairey Swordfish were foiled by a lack of suitable weapons and by heavy steel anti-torpedo nets strung across the waters of the dams to protect them. A more radical solution was needed and the British engineering genius Barnes Wallis supplied it: the Upkeep ‘bouncing bomb’, a cylindrical weapon like a heavyweight depth charge, imparted with backspin to rotate it at 500 revs a minute. If dropped at the right height and distance from the dam, the bomb would skim like a pebble thrown across the surface of the water, bounce over the top of the torpedo nets and strike the dam wall. The backspin would then hold it against the face of the dam as it sank below the water before detonating to blow, it was hoped, the dam apart. Having demonstrated the theoretical effectiveness of the bomb, all that was needed was a squadron of bomber crews capable of delivering it with sufficient accuracy. Since no such squadron existed, it became necessary to create one – 617 Squadron – and at the end of March 1943 recruitment of suitably skilled and experienced crews began under the leadership of Wing Commander Guy Penrose Gibson. He was a man with a glowing reputation as a fearless pilot, willing to take off in even the most marginal weather and attack the most heavily defended targets, whether capital ships or military or economic targets. The head of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, later described Gibson as ‘the most full-out fighting pilot’ under his command and ‘as great a warrior as this island ever bred’. Gibson had flown two full tours on bombers and one on night-fighters, completing the astonishing total of 172 sorties even before joining the new 617 Squadron. As a Squadron Leader and then a Wing Commander, he was as ruthless in screening his crews as he was aggressive in facing the enemy. That ruthlessness and an often abrasive and patrician manner, particularly with NCOs and ‘other ranks’, made him enemies – some of his ground crews nicknamed him ‘The Boy Emperor’ – but none could deny his courage or skill as a pilot, which were reflected by the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar and Distinguished Service Order and Bar he had already been awarded prior to joining 617 Squadron. Gibson was given a free hand in choosing men – all volunteers – from among crews who had already completed, or nearly completed, two tours of operations. The screening process continued even after they were chosen; Gibson posted two crews away from the squadron after deciding they were not up to the task and a third crew chose to leave after their navigator was also deemed unsatisfactory by Gibson. Intensive training of the remainder lasted for several weeks. In April 1943 alone, his crews completed over 1,000 flying hours, and at the end of that time Gibson reported that they could fly from pinpoint to pinpoint at low level in total darkness, fly over water at an altitude as low as 60 feet and carry out precision bombing with remarkable accuracy. They practised the raid itself using reservoirs in the Peak District and Rutland as substitutes for the Ruhr dams, and after a full-scale dress rehearsal on 14 May 1943, simulating the routes, topography and targets of the actual raid, Gibson pronounced it ‘completely successful’. The Dambusters – though no one yet called them that – were ready to take flight. They had been training for six weeks in the utmost secrecy for a low-level bombing mission, but none of them knew the actual targets until the final briefing on the day the raid was to be launched. When they were told, every man in the room felt a stab of fear, ‘and if they said any different,’ says air gunner Fred Sutherland, ‘they’d be lying, because it looked like a real suicide run.’ They were to target three dams – the M?hne, Eder and Sorpe – and their destruction would cause catastrophic flooding in the Ruhr valley and massive disruption to power generation, water supply, canal transport, agriculture, coal-mining, steel-making and arms manufacturing. If the raid successful. * * * On the nights she was not on duty, telephone operator Gwyn Johnson would often lie in bed, waiting in vain for sleep to come. She could sometimes hear the low, grumbling engine note of the bombers of 617 Squadron on their nearby base breaking the stillness of the night as, one by one, each pilot fired up his Lancaster’s four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and began to taxi from the dispersal areas to the end of the runway. She could picture them waiting until a green light flashed from the runway controller’s caravan, when each pilot in turn pushed the throttles to the stops and his heavy-laden bomber began rumbling slowly down the runway. The noise swelled as one by one they lumbered into the air before finally disappearing into the night, the roar of the engines fading again to a sound like the distant rumble of thunder from a summer storm. Not knowing whether her husband, Bomb Aimer Sergeant George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, was flying with them on any particular night, she often fell into an uneasy, fitful sleep, and a few hours later, as dawn approached, would wake again as she heard the aircraft return, no longer in a compact formation, but spread across the sky. Hours later – if he had time – she might meet her husband for a snatched cup of tea in a cafe. He’d tell her if he’d been flying the night before and, though he gave her only the sketchiest details of the mission he’d flown, the look on his face was enough to tell her whether his comrades had returned safely or, more often than not, when one or more aircraft would have failed to return. Yet, says Johnson, recalling those events seventy years later, ‘Gwyn had the same confidence as me that I would always come back. We both had an absolute belief we would survive.’ Johnson, a country boy from a small Lincolnshire village with a habit of talking out of the side of his mouth as if all his conversation was ‘hush-hush’ and on a ‘need to know’ basis, was the bomb-aimer in American pilot Joe McCarthy’s crew. Johnson and the rest of Joe McCarthy’s crew had all finished their thirty-op tour of duty with their previous squadron, 97, two months before the Dams raid, when they took part in a mass raid on the docks at St-Nazaire. ‘I could have called it a day after my thirty ops,’ Johnson says, ‘but I wanted to go on.’ After completing a tour, it was standard practice to be given a week’s leave before returning to duty, and Johnson and his fianc?e, Gwyn, had arranged to get married on 3 April 1943, during his leave. They’d met when he was at the aircrew receiving centre at Babbacombe in 1941. He was walking down the street with his mate when they saw two young ladies walking towards them, and Johnson recalls coming up with ‘the corniest chat-up line. I said, “Are you going our way?” to which one of them replied, “That depends on which your way is!” That was Gwyn, that was the start and I never looked back!’ However, the week before the wedding, McCarthy, now the proud holder of a DFC, called the crew together and told them that Wing Commander Guy Gibson had asked him to join a special squadron being formed for a single operation. His crew at once volunteered to go with him for that one trip. The first thing most of the aircrew noticed when they joined 617 Squadron was how experienced most of their fellows were – ‘lots of gongs on chests’ as Johnny Johnson recalls. ‘With all this experience, we were obviously up for something special.’ But he had ‘no idea what 617 Squadron was going to do,’ he says, ‘not a clue,’ but when he wrote to Gwyn and told her he was going on another op, he added, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just one trip. I’ll be there for the wedding.’ Her reply was brief and to the point: ‘If you’re not there on April the third, don’t bother.’ He thought that it would still be fine until they arrived at the new squadron’s base, Scampton, where one of the first things they were told was that there would be no leave for anyone until after the operation. However, McCarthy then marched his entire crew into Guy Gibson’s office and told him, ‘We’ve just finished our first tour; we’re entitled to a week’s leave. My bomb-aimer’s supposed to be getting married on the third of April and he’s gonna get married on the third of April.’ The patrician Guy Gibson didn’t like being told what to do by anyone, least of all an NCO, and an American to boot, but in the end he granted them four days’ leave and Johnson’s wedding went ahead. Wives of married aircrew weren’t allowed to live on base, but Gwyn, a military telephone operator, was posted to Hemswell, eight miles from Scampton, and she and Johnny could meet in Lincoln on their days or evenings off. The last buses for Hemswell and Scampton both left Lincoln at nine o’clock, and Johnson invariably ended up on the Hemswell bus and then had to walk the eight miles back to Scampton. ‘I was one of the few who had a wife close by,’ he says, ‘and it was important for me to get away from the squadron atmosphere to “normal” married life. We never talked about the war and certainly not about any fears or concerns for the future. Our time together was time away from the war.’ Johnny and Gwyn Johnson on their wedding day * * * Johnny Johnson and the rest of Joe McCarthy’s crew were one of nineteen Lancaster crews from 617 Squadron, a total of 133 airmen, who set out for Germany on that ‘one special op’ on the evening of 16 May 1943. At 9.28 that evening, a few minutes before the sun set over the airfield, the runway controller at RAF Scampton flashed a green Aldis lamp. The four Merlin engines of the Lancaster bomber, already lined up on the grass runway, roared up to maximum power and the aircraft thundered into the sky. 617 Squadron was on its way to Germany, and though none of the participants knew it at the time, into the history books. Two of the nineteen crews turned back even before reaching the enemy coast; one accidentally losing their bomb over the North Sea, another with a flak-damaged radio. Another Lancaster was lost altogether after its pilot, Flight Lieutenant Bill Astell, who like his peers was flying at extreme low level, flew straight into an electricity pylon, killing himself and his entire crew. Sixteen aircraft now remained. 617 Squadron’s leader, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, led the remainder of the first wave to their first target, the M?hne dam. Each crew would have to drop their bomb with total precision, flying at a speed of 232 mph, exactly 60 feet above the surface of the dam. There was no margin of error – dropped from too low an altitude, any water splash might damage the aircraft; too high and the bomb might simply sink or shatter. If dropped too far away, it could sink before reaching the dam; too close, and it might bounce over the parapet. While the remainder circled at the eastern end of the lake, Gibson began his bomb-run, swooping down over the forested hillside and roaring across the water towards the dam, its twin towers deeper black outlines against the darkness of the night sky. The Upkeep bomb was already spinning at 500 rpm, sending juddering vibrations through the whole aircraft – ‘like driving on a cobbled road’ as one crewman described it. Gibson had just fourteen seconds to adjust his height, track and speed before the moment of bomb-release. Alerted by the thunder of the Lancaster’s engines, the German gun-crews of the flak batteries sited in the two towers of the dam scrambled to their battle stations and opened fire. Not a trace of breeze ruffled the surface of the black water, which was so still that it reflected the streams of tracer from the anti-aircraft guns like a mirror, leading Gibson and the pilots making the first bomb-runs to believe there were not three but six anti-aircraft guns firing at them. At 0.28 on the morning of 17 May 1943 Guy Gibson’s bomb-aimer released his bomb. Gibson banked round in time to see the yellow flash beneath the surface of the water and subsequent waterspout, but as the water splashed down and the smoke dispersed, it was clear that his bomb had failed to breach the dam. He then circled and called in the next pilot, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood, nonchalantly describing the task as ‘a piece of cake’. It was anything but. Hopgood’s Lancaster had already been hit by flak as they flew across Germany towards the target, wounding several of his crew and giving him a serious facial wound, but he flew on, pressing a handkerchief against the wound to staunch the flow of blood. Turning to evade the probing searchlight beams, he flew so low that he even passed beneath the high-tension cables of a power line stretching across a landscape as dark as the night sky above them. As he made his bomb-run, Hopgood’s aircraft was again hit by flak and burst into flames. Although his bomb was released, it was dropped too close and bounced clean over the dam wall. Although it destroyed the electricity power station at its foot, sending a column of thick, black smoke high into the air, it did no damage to the dam itself. Hopgood managed to coax his stricken and burning aircraft up to 500 feet, giving his crew a slim chance of survival, but as he shouted ‘For Christ’s sake, get out!’ the flames reached the main wing fuel tank, which exploded. Two crewmen did manage to bale out, and survived, to see out the war as PoWs. His badly wounded wireless operator also baled out, but his parachute did not open in time. Hopgood and the other three members of his crew were trapped in the aircraft as it crashed in flames, and all were killed instantly. The twenty-five-year-old Australian pilot Harold ‘Mick’ Martin was next to make a bomb-run, with Gibson now bravely flying almost alongside him to distract the flak gunners and draw their fire. Martin’s bomb was released successfully, but two flak shells had struck a petrol tank in his starboard wing and, though it was empty of fuel and there was no explosion, the impact may have thrown their bomb off course. As Martin flew on between the stone towers of the dam, the bomb hit the water at an angle and bounced away to the left side of the dam, before detonating in the mud at the water’s edge. However, the force of the mud and water thrown up by the blast dislodged one of the flak guns on the southern tower from its mounting and the gun-crew of the battery in the northern tower were now also forced to change their red-hot gun-barrels. In the lull in the firing, Melvin ‘Dinghy’ Young – so named after surviving two ditchings at sea – made his bomb-run. His Upkeep was released perfectly, bouncing in smooth parabolas along the surface of the water. It struck the exact centre of the dam and sank deep below the surface before detonating against the dam wall. The explosion sent up another huge waterspout, but once more it appeared to have failed to breach the dam. The op looked to be heading for a disastrous failure, and the bouncing bombs’ designer, Barnes Wallis, waiting in the operations room back in England – the basement of a large house on the outskirts of Grantham – was almost beside himself as the succession of coded signals came through, announcing the failure of each bomb-run. He had tested his original concept by bouncing his daughter’s marbles across a tub of water, and had endured obstruction and ridicule before his ideas were accepted, but three bombs had already failed, and now the fourth bomb had also been dropped, once more without apparent effect. Gibson now called up David Maltby, just twenty-three and, like Mick Martin, already the holder of the DFC and DSO. He was the fifth to make his approach, flying in at 60 feet above the water, with Gibson and Martin both acting as decoys to draw off some of the anti-aircraft fire. They even switched on their navigation lights to distract the flak-gunners, while their own forward gunners poured fire into the enemy positions, but although the raiders did not know this, all the anti-aircraft guns had now been put out of action and the gunners could only fire rifles at the Lancaster roaring across the lake towards them. As he skimmed the surface of the water, his attention focused on the massive grey wall spanning the gap between the two towers, Maltby suddenly realised that the crest of the parapet was beginning to change shape. A crack had appeared, growing wider and deeper by the second as a section of masonry began to crumble and pieces of debris tumbled into the water. Close to his own bomb-release point, Maltby realised that Dinghy Young’s bomb had made a small breach in the dam which was already beginning to fail. As a result, Maltby veered slightly to port to target a different section of the dam just as his bomb-aimer dropped the Upkeep bomb. It was released perfectly, bouncing four times, before striking the dam wall and then sinking below the surface right against the dam face. Moments after Maltby’s aircraft passed over the parapet, the bomb erupted in a huge column of water mixed with silt and fragments of rock. It was still not clear at first if even this bomb had actually breached the dam, and, moments later, Barnes Wallis and the others listening in the operations room in England heard the terse radio signal: ‘Goner 78A’. ‘Goner’ meant a successful attack, ‘7’ signified an explosion in contact with the dam, ‘8’ no apparent breach, and ‘A’ showed the target was the M?hne dam. However, as the debris from the waterspout spattered down, Maltby could see that the dam – its masonry fatally weakened by the repeated bomb-blasts – was now crumbling under the monstrous weight of water it held, and as the raiders watched, the breach gaped wider. The torrent pouring through the ever-growing gap, dragging the anti-torpedo nets with it, hastened the M?hne dam’s complete destruction. As it collapsed, widening into a breach almost 250 feet across, a wall of water began roaring down the valley, a tide of destruction sweeping away villages and towns in its path. Tragically, among the countless buildings destroyed were the wooden barrack blocks housing hundreds of East European women that the Nazis had compelled to work as forced labourers. Almost all of them were drowned, and they formed by far the largest part of the 1,249 people killed by the raid, one of the highest death tolls from a Bomber Command operation at that time. Maltby sent a one-word radio transmission: the name of Gibson’s black Labrador dog, which told all those waiting in the operations room that the M?hne dam was no more. Air Marshal Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, turned to Barnes Wallis, shook his hand and said, ‘Wallis, I didn’t believe a word you said when you came to see me. But now you could sell me a pink elephant.’ Gibson told Maltby and Martin, who had both used their bombs and sustained flak damage, to turn for home, while he, old Etonian Henry Maudslay, the baby-faced Australian David Shannon – only twenty, but another pilot who was already the holder of the DSO and DFC – and yet another Australian, twenty-two-year-old Les Knight, who ‘never smoked, drank or chased girls’, making him practically unique in 617 Squadron on all three counts, flew on to attack the next target, the Eder dam. Thirteen storeys high, it was virtually unprotected by flak batteries, since the Germans believed that its position in a narrow, precipitous and twisting valley made it invulnerable to attack. The approach was terrifying, a gut-wrenching plunge down the steep rocky walls of the valley to reach the surface of the lake, leaving just seven seconds to level out and adjust height, track and speed before releasing the bomb. Shannon and Maudslay made repeated aborted approaches to the dam before, at 01.39 that morning, Shannon’s bomb-aimer finally released the Upkeep bomb. Shannon’s angle of approach sent the bomb well to the right of the centre of the dam wall, but it detonated successfully and he was convinced that a small breach had been made. Maudslay was next. Guy Gibson later described him pulling up sharply and then resuming his bomb-run, and other witnesses spoke of something projecting from the bottom of his aircraft, suggesting either flak damage or debris from a collision with the tops of the trees on the lake shore. Whatever the cause, Maudslay’s bomb was released so late that it struck the dam wall without touching the water and detonated immediately, just as Maudslay was overflying the parapet. The blast wave battered the aircraft, and although Maudslay managed to give the coded message that his bomb had been dropped, nothing more was heard from him or his crew. He attempted to nurse his crippled aircraft back to England but was shot down by flak batteries on the banks of the Rhine near the German-Dutch border. The Lancaster crashed in flames in a meadow, killing Maudslay and all the other members of his crew. Knight now began his bomb-run. Like Shannon, he made his approach over the shoulder of a hill, then made a sharp turn to port, diving down to 60 feet above the water, counted down by his navigator who was watching the twin discs of light thrown onto the black water by spotlights fitted beneath the fuselage, waiting until they converged into a figure ‘8’ that showed they were at exactly the right height. Knight’s bomb – the third to be dropped, and the last one the first wave possessed – released perfectly, hit the dam wall and sank before detonating. The blast drilled a hole straight through the dam wall, marked at once by a ferocious jet of water bursting from the downstream face of the dam. A moment later the masonry above it crumbled and collapsed, causing a deep V-shaped breach that released a tsunami-like wall of 200 million tons of water. The remaining aircraft of the second and third waves were now making for the third and last target of the night, the Sorpe dam. It was of different construction from the other two – a massive, sloping earth and clay mound with a thin concrete core, rather than a sheer masonry wall – making it a much less suitable target for Wallis’s bouncing bombs. Pilot Officer Joe McCarthy, a twenty-three-year-old New Yorker, was the only pilot of the second wave of five aircraft to reach the dam. Pilot Officer Geoff Rice had hit the sea near Vlieland, tearing his Upkeep bomb from its mounting and forcing him to abort the op and return to base. Like Astell, Flight Lieutenant Bob Barlow had collided with some electricity pylons, killing himself and all his crew, and Pilot Officer Vernon Byers had been hit by flak over the Dutch island of Texel. His aircraft crashed in flames, killing all seven men aboard. New Zealander Les Munro was also hit by flak as he crossed the Dutch coast. As he reached his turning point approaching the island of Vlieland, he could see the breakers ahead and the sand dunes rising above the level of the sea, and gained a little height to clear them. He was, he recalled, flying ‘pretty low, about thirty or forty feet, and I had actually cleared the top of the dunes and was losing height on the other side when a line of tracer appeared on the port side and we were hit by one shell amidships. It cut all the communication and electrical systems and everything went dead. The flak was only momentary, we were past it in seconds, but one lucky or unlucky hit – lucky it didn’t kill anyone, or do any fatal damage to us or the aircraft, but unlucky that one shot ensured we couldn’t complete the op we’d trained so long for’ – had forced them to abort the op and turn for home. For those who did make it to the target, the steep terrain and dangerous obstacles close to the Sorpe dam – tall trees on one side and a church steeple on the other – made it difficult to get low enough over the water for a successful bomb-drop. ‘All that bombing training we’d done,’ McCarthy’s bomb-aimer, Johnny Johnson, recalls, ‘we couldn’t use because, as the Sorpe had no towers, we had nothing to sight on. Also, it was so placed within the hills that you couldn’t make a head-on attack anyway. So we had to fly down one side of the hills, level out with the port outer engine over the dam itself so that we were just on the water side of the dam, and estimate as nearly as we could to the centre of the dam to drop the bomb. We weren’t spinning the bomb at all, it was an inert drop.’ McCarthy made no fewer than nine unsuccessful runs before Johnson, to the clear relief of the rest of the crew, was finally able to release their bomb. Had the dam been as well defended by flak batteries as the other dams, it would have been suicidal to make so many passes over the target, but at the Sorpe, the main threat was the precipitous, near-impossible terrain surrounding it. It was an accurate drop and the bomb detonated right at the centre of the dam, blasting a waterspout so high that water hit the rear gun turret of the Lancaster as it banked away, provoking a shocked cry of ‘God Almighty!’ from the rear gunner. McCarthy circled back but, although there was some damage to the top of the dam, there was no tell-tale rush of water that would have signalled a breach. Two of the five aircraft from the third wave had already been shot down on their way to the target. Pilot Officer Lewis Burpee, whose pregnant wife was waiting for him at home, was hit by flak after straying too close to a heavily defended German night-fighter base and then hit the trees. His bomb detonated as the Lancaster hit the ground with a flash that his horrified comrades described as ‘a rising sun that lit up the landscape like day’. All seven members of the crew were killed instantly. Bill Ottley’s Lancaster also crashed in flames after being hit by flak near Hamm. Ottley and five of his crew were killed, but by a miracle, his rear gunner, Fred Tees, although severely burned and wounded by shrapnel, survived and became a prisoner of war. Ground mist spreading along the river valleys as dawn approached was now making the task of identifying and then bombing their target even more difficult, and the third aircraft of the third wave, flown by Flight Sergeant Cyril Anderson, was eventually forced to abort the op and return to base without even sighting the target. Flight Sergeant Ken Brown, leading an all-NCO crew, did find the Sorpe, and after dropping flares to illuminate the dam they succeeded in dropping their bomb, once more after nine unsuccessful runs. Like McCarthy’s, the Upkeep struck the dam wall accurately and also appeared to cause some crumbling of its crest, but the dam held. Although the Sorpe still remained intact, for some reason the last aircraft, piloted by Bill Townsend, was directed to attack yet another dam, the Ennepe. Although he dropped his bomb, it bounced twice and then sank and detonated well short of the dam wall. Townsend’s was the last Lancaster to attack the dams, and consequently so late in turning for home that dawn was already beginning to break, making him a very visible target for the flak batteries. A superb pilot – on his way to the target he had dodged flak by flying along a forest firebreak below the level of the treetops – he was at such a low level as he crossed the Dutch coast and flew out over the North Sea that coastal gun batteries targeting him had the barrels of their guns depressed so far that shells were bouncing off the surface of the sea, and some actually bounced over the top of the aircraft. Although the Sorpe dam remained intact, the destruction of the M?hne and Eder dams had already ensured that Operation Chastise was a tremendous success, but it had been achieved at a terrible cost. Dinghy Young’s crew became the last of the night’s victims. An unusual character with an interest in yoga, who used to ‘spend much of his time during beer-drinking sessions, sitting cross-legged on tables with a tankard in his hand’, Young had reached the Dutch coast on his way back to base when he was shot down with the loss of all seven crew. His was the eighth aircraft to be lost that night, with a total of fifty-six crewmen killed or missing in action. Those waiting back in Lincolnshire for news, including Gwyn Johnson in her fitful sleep at her billet, faced a further anxious wait before the surviving Lancasters made it back. Townsend, the last to return, eventually touched down back at 617’s base at Scampton at a quarter past six that morning, almost nine hours after the first of the Dambusters had taken off. As usual, Gwyn Johnson had heard the aircraft taking off before she went to sleep the previous night and had woken up again as they were coming back. For reasons of security – and for Gwyn’s peace of mind – Johnny hadn’t told her about the op before taking off, and he didn’t tell her he’d been part of the Dams raid at all until months after the event. ‘I didn’t really want to tell her I’d been on that particular op,’ he says, ‘as I suspected she might be annoyed I’d never mentioned it previously. Sure enough, when she did find out, she gave me an earful for not telling her in the first place!’ On the night of the raid, there had been ‘no sleep for anyone’ waiting back at Scampton as the hours ticked by. ‘Our hearts and minds were in those planes,’ said one of the WAAFs who were waiting to serve them a hot meal on their return. As the night wore on, twice they heard aircraft returning and rushed outside to greet crews who had been forced to turn back before reaching the target and were nursing their damaged aircraft home. When they again heard engines in the far distance, the WAAFs were ordered back to the Sergeants’ Mess to start serving food to the first arrivals. They waited and waited, but no aircrew came in. Two hours later, their WAAF sergeant called them together to tell them the heartbreaking news that out of nineteen aircraft that had taken off that night, only eleven had returned, with the presumed loss of fifty-six lives. (In fact fifty-three men had died; the other three had been taken prisoner after baling out of their doomed aircraft.) ‘We all burst into tears. We looked around the Aircrews’ Mess. The tables we had so hopefully laid out for the safe return of our comrades looked empty and pathetic.’ Over the next few days, the squadron routine slowly reasserted itself and the pain of those losses began to diminish, but ‘things would never, ever be the same again’. The ground crews shared their sense of loss. ‘The ground crews didn’t get the recognition they deserved,’ one of 617’s aircrew says. ‘Without them we were nothing. They were out in rain, snow and sun, making sure the aircraft was always ready, always waiting for us to come back. And when one didn’t come back, it was their loss as much as anyone’s.’ The aircrews of 617 felt the deaths of their comrades and friends as keenly as anyone, of course. ‘We had lost a lot of colleagues that night and there was a real sense of loss,’ Johnny Johnson says. ‘There were so many who didn’t make it home – just a mixture of skill and sheer luck that it didn’t happen to us as well.’ However, most of the aircrews were veterans of many previous ops and, if not on this scale, had experienced the loss of friends a number of times before and developed ways of coping. It wasn’t callousness, far from it, but with deaths occurring on almost every op they flew, men who dwelt on the deaths of comrades would not survive long themselves. Losses of crewmates and friends were never discussed. ‘It just never came up,’ Johnny Johnson says: though I did think about death when my roommate on 97 Squadron, Bernie May, was killed. We were on the same op together when his pilot overshot the runway on landing, went through a hedge and smashed the nose up. Bernie was still in the bomb-aimer’s position and was killed outright. By the time I got back, all his gear had been cleared away from our room. It affected me that one minute he was there, and the next minute, no trace of him. Just bad luck really, but you just had to go on and find another friend. That was how it was then. ‘The hardest part was writing to the relatives of those that didn’t make it,’ front gunner Fred Sutherland says. ‘Trying to write to a mother, and all you could say was how sorry you were and what a good friend their son had been to you.’ ‘I’d lost friends and colleagues,’ Johnson adds: but never thought it would happen to me, and I had total trust in Joe McCarthy. He was a big man – six feet six – with a big personality, but also big in ability. He was strong on the ground and in the air, which gave the rest of the crew a tremendous boost. Joe had a toy panda doll called Chuck-Chuck, and we had a picture of it painted on the front of all the aircraft we flew. Other than that, I didn’t believe in lucky charms – you made your own luck – but we had such confidence in Joe that it welded us together. We all gave him the best we could and trusted him with our lives and I never, ever, thought he’d not bring me back home. McCarthy was a genial giant who had spent some of his youth working as a lifeguard at Coney Island. After three failed attempts to join the US Army Air Corps, he crossed the border and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force instead. He came to England in January 1942 and flew on operations to the Ruhr even before he’d completed his advanced training. He then joined 97 Squadron in September 1942, where Johnny Johnston became his bomb-aimer. Most of the ops they flew together were to the ironically named ‘Happy Valley’ – the Ruhr, which had such formidable air defences that bombing there was anything but a happy experience, and many of their fellow aircrews lost their lives. McCarthy led a multinational crew. He was from the Bronx in New York, his navigator Don McLean, rear gunner Dave Rodger, and flight engineer Bill Radcliffe were all Canadians, and the three Englishmen – Johnny Johnson, Ron Batson, the mid-upper gunner, and Len Eaton, the wireless operator – were NCOs. The mixture of rank and nationalities, Johnson says, ‘had no significance whatsoever to any of us. We were all on Christian-name terms, including Joe, and we all got on well. There was no stand-offishness, nothing to suggest any difference between any of us.’ By contrast their first meeting with their new commanding officer had been chilly, but Gibson was already known to get on much better with men of his own class and background than with ‘other ranks and colonials’. When Gibson was on 106 Squadron, Johnson says: he was known as the ‘Arch-Bastard’ because of his strict discipline, and one thing he didn’t have was much of an ability to mix with the lower ranks; he wasn’t able to bring himself to talk with the NCOs, and certainly not with the ground crews. He was a little man and he was arrogant, bombastic, and a strict disciplinarian, but he was one of the most experienced bomber pilots in Bomber Command, so he had something to be bombastic about. He spoke to us all at briefings, but he never spoke to me on a one-to-one basis, or ever shook my hand, or even acknowledged me. But that’s just the way he was and he was a true leader in the operational sense, his courage at the dams showed that. Gibson expected others to show no less courage and dedication, and he could be abrupt, even merciless, with those whom he decided had failed to meet his exacting standards. One of the reserve crews on the Dams raid, piloted by Yorkshireman Cyril Anderson, had been redirected to the Sorpe dam from their original target, but failed to find it. After searching for forty minutes, suffering a mechanical problem, and with dawn already beginning to lighten the eastern sky, Anderson aborted the op and returned to base with his Upkeep bomb still on board. Whether or not Anderson’s humble Yorkshire origins played a part in Gibson’s decision, he showed his displeasure by immediately posting Anderson and his crew back to 49 Squadron. In any event, the commander of that squadron did not share Gibson’s opinion of Anderson, and in fact recommended him for a commission as an officer shortly after he rejoined the squadron. However, others, even among the ‘other ranks’, found Gibson easier to deal with. He and his beer-drinking black Labrador – sadly run over outside Scampton the night before the Dams raid – were regulars in the Officers’ Mess, and wireless operator Larry Curtis, whose Black Country origins and rise from the ranks would not have made him a natural soulmate for Gibson, said of him: ‘I know some people said he was a bit hard, but I got on well with him … I found him hard but very just, you couldn’t ask any more than that. When it was time for business he was very businesslike, when it was time to relax, he relaxed with the best of them. I only regret I never had a chance to fly with him, because he was a wonderful pilot.’ Gibson had demonstrated his skill and bravery as both a pilot and a leader many times, but the Dams raid was to be his crowning achievement. Bomber Command C-in-C Arthur Harris had argued forcefully against the raid beforehand, describing the idea as ‘tripe of the wildest description’, but he and Air Vice Marshal The Honourable Ralph Cochrane, commander of 5 Group, of which 617 Squadron formed a part, had hurried from Grantham to Scampton to congratulate the returning heroes. For them, as for the government, the press and the nation, starved for so long of good news about the war, any reservations about the aircrew losses were swept away in the jubilation about the Dams raid’s success. 617 Squadron had shown Hitler and his Nazi hierarchy that the RAF could get through and destroy targets they had previously thought invulnerable. They had dealt a severe blow – albeit a short-term one, since the dams were repaired within months – to German arms production. They had forced the Germans to divert skilled workmen from constructing the Atlantic Wall to repair the dams, and that might well have a significant impact on the chances of success of an Allied invasion of France when it eventually came. Even those successes paled beside the huge impact the raid had on the morale of the people of Britain, and on public opinion around the world, particularly that of our sometimes reluctant and grudging ally, the United States. ‘I don’t think we appreciated how important the raid was in that respect,’ Johnny Johnson says, ‘until we saw the papers the next morning, when it was plastered all over the headlines. There had been the victory at El Alamein a few months before and now this, and it was a big, big change in what had been a bloody awful war for us until then.’ Ironically, Cochrane, a severe-looking man with a high forehead and a piercing stare, had warned the crews at their final briefing that the Dams raid might be ‘a secret until after the war. So don’t think that you are going to get your pictures in the papers.’ Security before the raid had been so tight that one of the local barmaids in Lincoln was sent on holiday, not because she was suspected of treachery but because she had such a remarkable memory and such a keen interest in the aircrews that it was feared she might inadvertently say something that would compromise the op. However, once the raid was over, any considerations of the need for secrecy were swept away like the dams, by the propaganda value of publicising the raid. The Dams raid chimed perfectly with the narrative created by British propagandists: the plucky but overwhelmingly outnumbered underdog fighting alone, and through expertise, ingenuity, courage and daring, breaching the defences of the monolithic enemy. The Daily Telegraph exulted on its front page that ‘With one single blow, the RAF has precipitated what may prove to be the greatest industrial disaster yet inflicted on Germany in this war,’ and the other newspapers were equally triumphant in tone. Guy Gibson was awarded a Victoria Cross for his leadership of the raid and more than half the surviving members of the squadron were also decorated, but Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s euphoria in the immediate aftermath of the raid soon gave way to pessimism. In a letter to the Assistant Chief of Air Staff he said he had ‘seen nothing … to show that the effort was worthwhile, except as a spectacular operation’, and although he often appeared unmoved by aircrew losses on Main Force – the major part of Bomber Command which carried out the near-nightly area bombing of German cities – he later remarked that missions where Victoria Crosses went along with high losses should not be repeated. However, the damage to German industry and infrastructure was undoubtedly considerable. Thousands of acres of farmland and crops were buried by silt, and the land could not be tilled for several years. Food production, output from the coal mines and steel and arms manufacture were all badly hit. The destruction of power stations further reduced industrial output, and the disruption to water supplies caused by wrecked pumping stations and treatment plants not only deprived factories of water but left firemen in the industrial towns unable to extinguish the incendiaries dropped by RAF bombers. The destruction of 2,000 buildings in Dortmund was directly attributed to this. Nonetheless, when Barnes Wallis, who had also hurried to Scampton to add his congratulations, was told of the deaths of so many airmen, he cried. ‘I have killed all those young men,’ he said. His wife wrote to a friend the next day: ‘Poor B didn’t get home till 5 to 12 last night … and was awake till 2.30 this morning telling me all about it … He woke at six feeling absolutely awful; he’d killed so many people.’ Although Guy Gibson and the others did their best to reassure him, according to his daughter Mary, Wallis lived with the thought of those deaths throughout the rest of his life. The Australian pilot Mick Martin’s opinion was that most of the casualties on the Dams raid had been caused because their navigation had been ‘a bit astray’ and, more importantly, because pilots didn’t keep below 200 feet on their way to the target. ‘Of course,’ said his rear gunner, who shared Martin’s views, ‘it’s easy to criticise when you’re sitting down at the back, arse about face, instead of up front where you see things rushing at you head-on, and even though it is moonlight, which can be almost as bright as day, there is a great risk of miscalculation of height, and objects such as power lines don’t show up like the Boston Stump’ – the remarkably tall tower of St Botolph’s church in Boston, rising over 270 feet above the Lincolnshire fens, and visible from miles away. The surviving aircrews washed away the bad memories of the night and toasted their success with a few beers. The Mess bars were reopened and drink was taken in considerable quantities. Some of the aircrews had ‘a mug of beer in each hand’, according to the Squadron Adjutant, Harry ‘Humph’ Humphries. ‘I could hardly keep my eyes open, yet these lads drank away as though they had just finished a good night’s sleep. The only thing that contradicted this was the number of red-rimmed eyes that could be seen peering into full beer mugs.’ ‘The celebrations were in full swing,’ Les Munro says, ‘and I wondered if I really deserved to be part of it all. Should I be taking part in this when I hadn’t reached the target? All that training, preparation had been for nothing. But no one ever made any comment about us not getting to the target.’ The celebrations ended with a conga line of inebriated airmen visiting Station Commander Group Captain Charles Whitworth’s house and then departing again, having deprived the sleeping Whitworth of his pyjamas as a trophy. But while the crews had been celebrating or drowning their sorrows, Harry Humphries had the painful task as Squadron Adjutant of composing fifty-six telegrams and then fifty-six personal letters to wives and families, telling them that their loved ones would not be coming home. Once the initial euphoria had passed, reactions within the squadron to the success of the Dams raid tended to be more muted. Some were elated but for most, ‘we were satisfied in doing the Dams raid,’ Johnson says, ‘but nothing more really. It was just another job we had to do. I had no sense of triumphalism or excitement, we realised what we had done, and were very satisfied, but that was all.’ However, in a public demonstration of the importance of the raid to British morale, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to the squadron on 28 May 1943, with all the aircrews lined up, standing to attention and with their toecaps touching a white line that had been specially painted on the grass. They spent five hours there, though ‘naturally, of course, neither the King nor Queen visited the Sergeants’ Mess’. The gallantry awards for the raid – one Victoria Cross, five DSOs, fourteen DFCs, eleven DFMs and two Conspicuous Gallantry medals – were then awarded by the Queen in an investiture at Buckingham Palace on 22 June. Johnny Johnson hadn’t ‘the foggiest idea’ what the Queen said to him. ‘I was so bloody nervous. All I can remember saying is “Thank you, Ma’am” and that was it.’ Although he was a teetotaller – ‘I couldn’t even stand the smell of beer,’ he says, ‘so I never went into the bars apart from a quick dash at lunchtime to pick up cigarettes’ – he was in a minority of close to one on the squadron, and his fellows more than made up for him, with the investiture the trigger for a marathon booze-up. They were given a special carriage on the train taking them to London, where they had ‘a high old time’, and after chatting to the driver and his fireman during a stop at Grantham, Mick Martin’s crew made the next stage of the journey down to Peterborough on the footplate of the engine. They each threw a few shovelsful of coal into the firebox and took turns to operate the regulator under the supervision of the driver and ‘gave the old steam chugger full bore’. The driver offered to stand them a drink at any pub of their choice in London, and they duly obliged him at the appropriately named Coal Hole in the Strand. The more well-to-do of the aircrews stayed at the Mayfair Hotel, while the less affluent settled for the Strand, and in the words of one of the Australians, ‘for twenty-four hours there was a real whoopee beat-up’. As a result none of them were looking at their best on the morning of the investiture. Mick Martin’s braces had disappeared somewhere along the line, but his resourceful crewmates ‘scrounged a couple of ties and trussed him up like a chicken, sufficient to get him onto the dais at Buckingham Palace, down the steps and off again’. The squadron’s resourcefulness was also demonstrated by one of Mick Martin’s crewmen, Toby Foxlee, who, as petrol was strictly rationed, obtained a regular supply of fuel for his MG by ‘a reduction process’ which involved pouring high-octane aircraft fuel through respirator canisters he had scrounged; ‘the little MG certainly used to purr along pretty sweetly’. On the evening of the investiture, A. V. Roe, the manufacturers of the Lancaster, threw a lavish dinner party at the Hungaria restaurant in Regent Street for the ‘Damn [sic] Busters following their gallant effort on the Rhur [sic] Dams’ – the budget for the dinner clearly didn’t extend to a proofreader for the menu! Given the austerity of wartime rationing, a menu including ‘Crabe Cocktail, Caneton Farci a l’Anglaise, Asperges Vertes, Sauce Hollandaise, and Fraises au Marasquin’, washed down with cocktails and ample quantities of 1929 Riesling, 1930 Burgundy and vintage port, was an astonishing banquet. As the heroes of 617 Squadron celebrated their awards that night, Bomber Command’s war against Germany ploughed on with a raid by nearly 600 aircraft against the city of Mulheim, north of D?sseldorf. The city’s own records describe the accuracy of the bombing and the ferocity of the fires. Roads into and out of the area were cut and the only means of escape was on foot. The rescue services were overwhelmed, resulting in terrible destruction. Five hundred and seventy-eight people were killed and another 1,174 injured. Public buildings, schools, hospitals and churches were all hit. The German civilian population was paying a high price for Nazi aggression. Churchill’s War Cabinet were quick to use the success of the Dams raid in the propaganda war against the enemy, and some of 617’s aircrews were sent on publicity tours that spanned the globe, spreading the message about how good the RAF’s premier squadron was through the world’s press, radio stations and cinema newsreels. The main attraction was of course the leader of the raid, Guy Gibson, who was taken off ops, stood down as commander of the squadron, and sent on a near-permanent flag-waving tour, though before he left he managed to fit in a last trip to see ‘one of the local women, a nurse, with whom he had been involved while his wife was in London’. Gibson also ‘wrote’ (it is possible that Roald Dahl, working as an air attach? at the British Embassy in Washington, was the actual author) a series of articles, and a draft script for a movie of the Dams raid that director Howard Hawks was contemplating, then settled down to write his account of the Dams raid and his RAF career: Enemy Coast Ahead. Mick Martin was by now widely recognised as the finest pilot on the squadron and had a wealth of operational experience behind him, but either his relatively lowly rank of Flight Lieutenant, requiring a double promotion to get him to the rank of Wing Commander – ‘it was considered not the done thing for him to jump two ranks’ – or a belief among his superiors that he was a lax disciplinarian had counted against him – or perhaps the RAF ‘brass’ just didn’t want an Australian as CO. In any case, after just six weeks, he was replaced by Squadron Leader George Holden, who had taken over Guy Gibson’s crew following his departure. If Holden shared something of Gibson’s arrogance and his coolness towards NCOs, he lacked the former commander’s charisma and leadership ability, and was not generally popular with his men. His reign as commander of 617 was not to prove a long one, and in the perhaps biased opinion of Mick Martin’s rear gunner, ‘somebody made a bad mistake’ in appointing Holden at all, since his knowledge of low flying was ‘practically nil’. Martin, by contrast, was ‘superb, a complete master of the low-flying technique’, and so dedicated that he continued to practise his skills every day. One new recruit to the squadron was given Martin’s formula for success at low level: ‘Don’t, if you can help it, fly over trees or haystacks, fly alongside them!’ His bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, was also the Squadron Bombing Leader, charged with ensuring his peers achieved the highest possible degree of accuracy. In this, he was encouraged by Air Vice Marshal Ralph Cochrane, who on one celebrated occasion even flew as bomb-aimer with Mick Martin’s crew on a practice bombing detail. Cochrane arrived ‘all spick and span in a white flying suit’, took the bomb-aimer’s post and achieved remarkable accuracy. The results were shown to the other crews, with the implicit message that if an unpractised bomb-aimer like Cochrane could achieve such results, the full-time men on 617 Squadron should be doing a lot better themselves. While Martin was in temporary charge, his crew had put their enforced spare time to good use by creating a garden in front of ‘the Flights’ – the place where they spent their time before training flights or ops, often hanging around waiting for the weather to clear. Having found a pile of elm branches, they erected a rustic fence with an arch at the front and the squadron number at its apex, picked out in odd-shaped pieces of wood. They scavenged, dug up and, in cases of dire necessity, bought plants and shrubs, creating a peaceful haven. Sitting there in the sunshine, inhaling the scents of flowers and listening to the birdsong and the drowsy sound of bees, they could imagine themselves far from the war … until the spell was broken as the Merlin engines of one of the squadron’s Lancasters roared into life. As the euphoria of the Dams raid faded, the remaining men of 617 and the new arrivals brought in to replace the crews lost on the raid settled down to a period of training which extended, almost unbroken, for four months. ‘There was quite a gap between ops after the dams,’ Fred Sutherland says, ‘though I must say, I wasn’t that bothered, and in no hurry to get back on ops.’ Not all of the replacements were as experienced as the original crews. When Larry Curtis first reported to his commander, Gibson looked him over and then said, ‘I see you haven’t got any decorations, which surprises me.’ ‘The day after I joined, I was on operations,’ Curtis said, with a grin, ‘which surprised me!’ Born at Wednesbury in 1921, Curtis joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve from Technical College in November 1939. After training as a wireless operator/air gunner, he was posted to 149 Squadron, flying Wellingtons, and took part in the attack on the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at Brest. After completing thirty ops, Curtis was sent to a bomber training unit as a wireless instructor, but still flew on the first thousand-bomber raid to Cologne. Commissioned in January 1943, he converted to the Halifax and joined 158 Squadron. During a raid on Berlin in March 1943 his aircraft was hit by flak over the target and all four engines stopped. As the aircraft spiralled towards the ground, the crew were about to bale out, when one engine picked up and the pilot was then able to recover and start the remaining three. Having already completed two bomber tours, Curtis joined Mick Martin’s crew on 617 Squadron in July 1943 as one of the replacements for the men lost on the Dams raid. One of the main attractions for a lot of the aircrew joining 617 Squadron was the chance to fly low level. After flying at 10,000 to 15,000 feet on his previous ops, the thought of operating at 100 feet or even less was thrilling for Johnny Johnson. ‘I thought, Wahey! Before I had been sitting on top of those bloody clouds and you could see nothing until you got to the target and then all you saw was rubbish. So it was absolutely exhilarating, just lying there and watching the ground going Woooof! Woooof! Wooooof! underneath me!’ Against the regulations, he always took off and landed from his position in the nose. ‘I didn’t see the point of trying to stagger back and forwards to the normal position by the spar. So I could see the runway rushing beneath my nose every time we took off, and as we landed, the runway raced up to meet me – I loved that!’ One of their practice routes was over the Spalding tulip fields, and Johnson remembers a guilty feeling as they flew over the fields at low level, leaving a snowstorm of multi-coloured, shredded blooms and petals in their wake, torn up by the slipstream. In some ways the tail gunners had the worst job, with the greatest amount of time to ponder their fate. One rear gunner found it: a very lonely job, cold and lonely, stuck out at the back of the aircraft with no one to glance at for reassurance or a little comfort. The first op was the worst; the only person who knew what it would be like was the skipper, because he had been on one op before with another crew. And he wouldn’t tell us what it was going to be like; he didn’t want to put the wind up us. We were naive and quite happy to trust to luck. Oh, I was afraid, especially of what was to come, the unknown, but you just couldn’t show it. The odds were stacked against us, we knew that at the time, knew that the losses were huge. It’s not a particularly nice thought, but once you were in that situation you just had to carry on and do the job you were trained for, and you just blotted out everything else. You ignored the flak, ignored the aircraft going down around you. What else could you do? In many ways you were stuck in the middle of that horror, those losses. You don’t ‘cope’ with it, do you? You just do it. Having been specifically formed for that single op against the dams, it now appeared to pilots like Les ‘Happy’ Munro (also known as ‘Smiler’ – both nicknames were sarcastic, because he was famed for his dour demeanour) that ‘nobody knew what to do with us. There was a hiatus, a sense of frustration. What was 617 Squadron for? The powers that be couldn’t seem to make up their minds about what to do with this special squadron they’d created.’ Munro was a New Zealander, but had enlisted because of: a general feeling that we were part of the British Empire, and had an allegiance to King and Country. We were really aware, through radio broadcasts and cinema newsreels, of what Britain was facing and what they were being subjected to: the air attacks, the Blitz. It was a sense of duty for most of us young men in New Zealand to fight for ‘the old country’ against the Nazis, but of course I had no idea at all of what would happen to me or what was to come: the devastation, the dangers, the losses I’d see and experience. Nor that seventy years on I’d still be talking about it! ‘Being on 617 meant that there could be quite a long gap between ops,’ another crewman says. I remember going on leave and meeting friends from my engineers’ course who had nearly finished their thirty-op tour whilst I’d only done three or four. That’s when you began to understand how different 617 was. My friends said I was a ‘lucky bastard’ for being on 617 and not Main Force, and they were probably right – I wouldn’t have liked to be on MF from all the stories I heard and read afterwards. 617’s lack of ops led aircrew from 57 Squadron, also based at Scampton, to shower them with jibes and insults and give them the sardonic nickname ‘The One-op Squadron’. The men of 617 retaliated by ‘debagging many of the Fifty-Seven men in a scragging session in the Officers’ Mess’, but they also ruefully acknowledged their reputation in their own squadron song, which they sang to the tune of a hymn written in 1899, ‘Come and Join Our Happy Throng’: The M?hne and Eder dams were standing in the Ruhr, 617 Squadron bombed them to the floor. Since that operation the squadron’s been a flop, And we’ve got the reputation of the squadron with one op. Come and join us, Come and join us, Come and join our happy throng. Selected for the squadron with the finest crews, But the only thing they’re good for is drinking all the booze. They’re not afraid of Jerry and they don’t care for the Wops, Cos they only go to Boston to do their bloody ops. Come and join us … To all you budding aircrew who want to go to heaven, Come join the forces of good old 617. The Main Force go to Berlin and are fighting their way back, But we only go to Wainfleet where there isn’t any flak. Come and join us … Come and join our happy throng. CHAPTER 2 (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) What Next? (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) While some crewmen on 617 Squadron were chafing at their inactivity, Johnny Johnson welcomed the lack of ops. ‘It meant I had more time with Gwyn, and we had so little time together that it was important to make the most of every minute.’ Born in 1921 near Horncastle in Lincolnshire, Johnson had been one of six children. Unfortunately, my mother died two weeks before my third birthday, so I never really knew a mother’s love. It really affected me – I remember seeing her in the hospital bed. I was standing next to my father and another man, and my father described me to him as ‘this one is the mistake’. I remember that to this day. I had a very unhappy childhood. He wouldn’t let me go to grammar school and was ruining my life. Eventually I went to the Lord Wandsworth agricultural college for children who had lost a parent. Again, my father had said no, but the local squire’s wife went to see him and told him in no uncertain terms that he had to let me go! I was eleven at the time. By November 1940 Johnson was a trainee park keeper with ambitions to be the superintendent of a big London park, but with London suffering under the Blitz, he thought: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ He wanted to be part of the war, not left behind, but didn’t want to join the Army. ‘I had seen the reports of World War One trench warfare, casualties and the like, and didn’t want any of that, and I didn’t like water, so the Navy was out! So that left the RAF. I wanted to be on bombers so I could take the war to the enemy, to get at the Germans. I had no thought of any dangers back then, I just didn’t think about it.’ Like many other British aircrew, Johnson did his initial training in America because, even before Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the Americans into the war, the US government had arranged discreet support for the British war effort by secretly training British aircrew under the Arnold Scheme. To maintain the fiction of American neutrality, aircrew wore civilian clothes and travelled via Canada, before slipping across the US border. Johnny Johnson pictured in 1947 Johnson returned to the UK in January 1942 and, desperate to get into action, volunteered to train as a gunner – the shortest training course. Testing his resolve, the president of the selection board said to him, ‘I think you’d be afraid to be a gunner, Johnson.’ ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he said. ‘If I was, I wouldn’t have volunteered in the first place!’ ‘So I gave as good as I got,’ he says now, with a chuckle. ‘I was going to prove to him that I wasn’t afraid! I had no sense of fear or thoughts of what the future might hold, and certainly no idea of the losses Bomber Command would suffer.’ Johnson retrained as a bomb-aimer, not least because they earned five shillings (25p – about ?10 at today’s values) a day more than gunners. As a bomb-aimer, he manned the front gun turret on the route out and only went into the bomb-aimer’s compartment as they approached the target. He then fused and selected the bombs, set the distributor and switched on his bombsight. Lying in the nose of the aircraft on the bombing run, he could see the flak coming up at him, but had to ignore that and concentrate on doing his job. From a distance the flak bursts could seem almost beautiful, opening like white, yellow and orange flowers, but closer to, dense black smoke erupted around them and there was the machine-gun rattle of shrapnel against the fuselage and the stench of cordite from each smoking fragment that pierced the aircraft’s metal skin. ‘I don’t think I was afraid,’ he says: but when you see the flak you have to go through, I think anyone who didn’t feel some apprehension was lacking in emotion or a stranger to the truth, but you didn’t want to let anyone down. The crew were doing their jobs and mine was to get those bombs on the target to the exclusion of all else. Once we got to the target area, I was too busy concentrating on the bombsight and dropping the bombs in the right place to worry about what else was going on. Despite his initial scepticism about the value of a ‘special squadron’, in mid-July 1943, two months after the Dams raid, Bomber Harris proposed using 617 Squadron to assassinate the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. A letter to the Prime Minister from the Chief of the Air Staff revealed that Harris had asked permission to bomb Mussolini in his office in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, and his house, the Villa Torlonia, simultaneously, ‘in case Il Duce is late that morning … Harris would use the squadron of Lancasters (No. 617) which made the attacks on the dams. It is manned by experts and is kept for special ventures of this kind.’ It was suggested that if Mussolini were killed ‘or even badly shaken’, it might increase the Allies’ chances of speedily forcing Italy out of the war. However, the plan was vetoed by Foreign Office officials, who were unconvinced that eliminating Mussolini would guarantee an Italian surrender and feared that it might even lead to his replacement by a more effective Italian leader. Two days later, on 15 July 1943, 617 Squadron at last saw some fresh action, though it proved to be what one Australian rear gunner dismissed as ‘a stooge trip’ – an attack on a power station at San Polo d’Enza in northern Italy. ‘We screamed across France at practically zero level, climbed like a bat out of hell to get over the Alps, and then screamed down on to St Polo and completely obliterated the unfortunate power station without seeing a single aircraft or a single burst of flak.’ Other crews would have been grateful even for that level of activity, one pilot complaining that after two months’ inaction, when they finally did get an op it was ‘to bomb Italy … with leaflets’. As Joe McCarthy grumpily remarked, it was ‘like selling god-damned newspapers’. There was only one thing McCarthy hated more than dropping leaflets, and that was signing forms, and one of his duties was to sign his aircrews’ logbooks every month. It was a task he seemed to find more difficult and intimidating than the most dangerous op. His education had been as much on the streets of the Bronx and the beaches of Coney Island as in the classroom, and his handwriting was laborious and painfully slow. He would put the task off as long as possible and when he could finally avoid it no longer, his crewmates would gather to watch, in fits of laughter at the sight of their huge and normally unflappable Flight Commander, with his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, sweating buckets and cursing under his breath as he struggled to complete the hated task. During that summer of 1943, 617 Squadron moved from Scampton to Coningsby, where they would have the advantage of concrete runways, rather than the grass strips they had been using at Scampton. Those grass runways, camouflaged with ‘hedgerows’ painted on the turf to fool German raiders, had been less of a problem than they might have been, because the airfield was at the top of an escarpment and the natural drainage prevented Scampton from becoming boggy in all but the most relentless wet weather. However, with the squadron’s Lancasters carrying increasingly heavy fuel- and bomb-loads, a move to Coningsby was necessary, and 617’s pilots were soon airborne and familiarising themselves with the local landmarks there: a windmill in the nearby Coningsby village, Tattershall Castle to the north-west, beyond the river Bain, and, most distinctive of all, the towering St Botolph’s church, universally known as the ‘Boston Stump’. It was a rheumy, water-filled land, criss-crossed by dykes and ditches, and prone to autumn mists and winter fogs that often forced returning aircraft to divert elsewhere. There were farms dotted among the heathland and birch woods, rich pastures and water meadows, but to many of the aircrew the endless plains beneath the vast canopy of the skies seemed echoingly empty of life. * * * During the summer of 1943, Main Force had continued to take the war to the enemy, with Operation Gomorrah – the virtual destruction of Hamburg in a raid beginning on 24 July – creating havoc on an unprecedented scale. In one hour alone, 350,000 incendiaries were dropped there, and succeeding waves of British and US bombers over the next few days created firestorms that engulfed the city, killing 30,000 people. Elsewhere in the war, the tide was increasingly running in the Allies’ favour. The Battle of Kursk had been launched by the Nazis in early July, but it proved to be their last major offensive on the Eastern Front, and the Soviets first neutralised the attack and then launched their own counter-offensive, driving the Germans back. In the west, the invasion of Sicily began on 10 July, and within five weeks the whole island was under Allied control, while on the Italian mainland Mussolini was deposed on 25 July 1943. 617 Squadron’s long period of relative inactivity came to an abrupt end on 14 September 1943, when they were tasked with attacking the Dortmund–Ems Canal, a waterway 160 miles long, and the only one linking the Ruhr valley with eastern Germany and the ports of the Baltic and North Seas. That made it the most important canal system in Germany, a vital artery feeding Germany’s war industries with strategic materials including the crucial imports of Swedish iron ore, and transporting finished products that ranged from arms and munitions to prefabricated U-boat sections. The canal was most vulnerable north of M?nster around Ladbergen, where it ran in twin aqueducts over the river Glane. To either side of the aqueducts the canal was carried in embankments raised above the level of the surrounding land, and these, rather than the aqueducts, were designated as 617 Squadron’s targets with the first operational use of much more powerful 12,000-pound High Capacity (HC) bombs, of which three-quarters of the weight was high explosive, compared with half in the smaller bombs. On the face of it, 617’s task was simple: bombing from 150 feet at a speed of 180 miles an hour, they were to drop their bombs on a precise aiming point within 40 feet of the west bank of the canal until a breach had been achieved. The remaining bombs were then to be dropped on alternate banks of the canal, moving north at 50-yard intervals to ensure as widespread a destruction of the canal embankments as possible. Even one bomb breaching the embankment would drain the canal, halting the flow of barge traffic, flooding the surrounding area and preventing millions of tons of Nazi supplies and weapons of war from reaching the front lines. However, the HC bombs were like elongated dustbins, built without streamlining and only small fins to enable them to fit into the bomb-bay. This made them unstable in flight and hard to drop accurately. Six Mosquito fighter-bombers were to escort the squadron’s Lancasters, operating as ‘can-openers’ by dealing with any flak hot-spots on the route. The Lancasters were to approach the target at extreme low level – 30 feet over Holland and Germany – before climbing to 150 feet to bomb. Although they had been practising for several weeks, flying low level along English canals, first by day and later by night, not everyone was happy with the idea of another low level attack on a heavily defended target. ‘Our losses at the dams had been around fifty per cent,’ Fred Sutherland says. ‘And certainly I had doubts about this next op. My main concern was flying around at night, at very low level, with all those power cables criss-crossing everywhere.’ Born in 1923, Sutherland was Canadian, a full Cree Native American, who had volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force the minute he turned eighteen. ‘I couldn’t wait to get in the war in any way possible,’ he says. ‘Everybody wanted to get in. We were still suffering from the Depression, unemployment was high and it was a means to escape all that. All the talk was about the war and I wanted to be involved. I didn’t really understand what it would be like though, I had no idea what was to come, what I’d go through, so I suppose I was naive.’ After completing an air gunner’s course, he crewed up with Les Knight, a ‘short but very muscular’ Australian pilot, ‘strong in the shoulders and arms. He was a wonderful pilot,’ Sutherland says, ‘very quiet, but if you were out of line, he quietly told you that you’d better not do that again.’ David Maltby’s crew One of the two four-ships – formations of four aircraft – making the raid was to be led by Squadron Leader David Maltby, a very skilful pilot who had completed thirty ops over Germany and been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross even before joining 617. Still only twenty-three, having struck the fatal blow against the M?hne dam, he was now one of the most highly decorated officers in the RAF and, like his comrades on the Dams raid, a national celebrity. A fun-loving, gentle giant over six feet tall, he was the life and soul of every party and always up for a prank; while training for the Dams raid, he had often ‘buzzed’ his wife Nina’s family farm. His first child, a son, had been born soon afterwards; the shock of Maltby’s aerobatics overhead may or may not have hastened the birth. Maltby’s personal good luck token was a filthy, oil-stained forage cap. He had worn it on the night of the Dams raid, never flew without it, and even wore it on parade. He donned it once more as he prepared to lead Operation Garlic – the raid on the Dortmund–Ems Canal. It would be his crew’s first operation since the dams, and they would be flying at low level, straight into anti-aircraft gunfire, just as they had at the dams. The op was scheduled as a night-time raid on 14 September 1943, and eight Lancasters took off around midnight, but were recalled within forty minutes because of cloud obscuring the target. However, that ‘boomerang’ order resulted in tragedy. After acknowledging the order to return to base, Maltby’s Lancaster crashed into the North Sea 8 miles off Cromer on the Norfolk coast, killing everyone on board. Famed as the man who breached the M?hne dam, Maltby had now joined the mounting tally of the squadron’s dead. Although the official accident report mentioned ‘some obscure explosion and a fire’ before the aircraft’s fatal crash, it was believed for many years that Maltby had simply misjudged his height and dipped a wing into the sea, with fatal consequences. However, a rival theory has recently been advanced, claiming that he collided with a Mosquito from 139 Squadron that was returning from a separate raid on similar routing, and was also lost without trace that night. Dave Shannon circled over the crash site for over two hours until an air-sea rescue craft arrived, but Maltby’s body was the only one ever to be recovered; his fellow crew members were lost in the depths of the North Sea, and are listed simply as having ‘no known grave’. Their average age was just twenty. David Maltby is buried in a quiet corner of St Andrew’s churchyard at Wickhambreaux near Canterbury, the church in which he had married Nina just sixteen months earlier. His son, just ten weeks old at the time of Maltby’s death, would now never know his father. The following night, the surviving members of the squadron returned to the Dortmund–Ems Canal, with Mick Martin’s crew replacing Maltby’s. ‘Crews as a whole accepted the loss of a friend as a downside of the war in the air they were engaged in,’ Les Munro says, a view echoed by Larry Curtis. ‘One accepted the fact that you weren’t coming back from this war. I did and most people did and it helped a lot. You were frightened but you knew it had to be done, so you did it.’ However, Maltby’s death had given some of the aircrews pause for thought, and there was considerable trepidation about the op. ‘I knew Dave Maltby,’ Johnny Johnson recalls. ‘He and Les Munro were on 97 Squadron with us, so when he’d been lost the night before, there was already a sense of it being a dodgy op.’ The nervousness about the op only served to strengthen the importance of the pre-flight rituals or superstitions that almost all the crews followed. Every aircraft was carrying eight men rather than the usual seven, with an extra gunner aboard to ensure that all the gun turrets would be manned at all times throughout the flight. Unlike most of the other crews, one of Les Knight’s crew’s rituals was not peeing on the rear wheel before boarding their aircraft, and when Les Woollard, the extra gunner they were carrying, began to do so they all rushed over and pulled him away. ‘We were not really bothered though,’ Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland says, ‘we were just fooling with him.’ Sutherland thinks his crew was not superstitious, but then adds, ‘but we always did the same routine. I always ate my chocolate bar when we were charging down the runway, and I always wore the same socks that my girlfriend, now my wife, had knitted for me.’ Eight Lancasters, all carrying 12,000-pound delayed-action bombs, and flying in two four-ships, took off at midnight on a beautiful, clear moonlit night. As they crossed the North Sea, the lessons learned on the Dams raid led them to adopt a new method of crossing the hostile coastline. Instead of flying a constant low level approach, they climbed before reaching the coast, but then went into a shallow dive back to low level, building up speed before flashing over the coastal flak batteries. ‘And it really was low level,’ wireless operator Larry Curtis recalls. ‘I can remember the pilot pulling up to go over the high-tension cables.’ ‘What was really scary for me were the power wires,’ adds Fred Sutherland, who had the closest view of them from his gun turret under his aircraft’s nose. ‘Even if there was moonlight, you couldn’t see the wires until you were practically on them, and once you hit them, that was it, you were done for.’ George Holden led the formation, with Mick Martin on his starboard flank and Les Knight to port. Rear gunner Tom Simpson heard Martin and his bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, complaining that Holden was flying too high, allowing the searchlights to pick them up. ‘We seemed to be getting into a lot of trouble and I had never experienced such intense ground fire.’ Just before reaching the small German town of Nordhorn, Martin was, as usual, flying ‘lower than low’, squeezing between some factory chimney stacks, ‘the top of the stacks being higher than we were’, but Holden, still much higher, was drawing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Fred Sutherland, front gunner in Les Knight’s crew, whose job was to attack ‘any ground flak units that started firing at us, tried to return fire but couldn’t depress my gun enough because we were right on top of it’. Rather than skirting a white-painted church with a high steeple near the town centre at low level, Holden opted to fly over it. Moments later, his aircraft was hit by lines of red and green tracer that flashed upwards, biting into his starboard wing. Almost immediately the aircraft was engulfed in flames. ‘There was poor old Holden up about four hundred feet or more, being shot to blazes and on fire.’ Holden’s aircraft went out of control, diving and veering sharply to port. Les Knight had to haul on the controls to avoid a collision with his leader’s aircraft and within seconds Holden’s Lancaster had crashed and exploded with the loss of everyone – Guy Gibson’s Dambusters crew – on board. It was Holden’s thirtieth birthday. ‘They just dived down, nearly hitting us on the way,’ Fred Sutherland recalls, ‘straight into the ground with a huge explosion. It was some sight – eight guys just dying in front of my eyes. They didn’t have a hope. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Your friends are getting killed and you are scared as hell but you can’t let it bother you; if you did, you could never do your job. You just think, “Thank God it wasn’t us.”’ The blast from the crash almost brought down the two Lancasters flying close behind him, but, fortunately, his delay-fused 12,000-pounder didn’t explode. Had it detonated on impact, all the other aircraft in his formation, flying as low as 30 feet above the ground, would almost certainly have been destroyed as well. Instead an unfortunate German family whose farm was the site of Holden’s fatal crash suffered a tragic blow when the bomb detonated fifteen minutes later. Alerted by the anti-aircraft fire and the thunder of the approaching bombers, the farmer, his wife and their six children had been sheltering in a cellar beneath their farmhouse when the crash occurred. However, a few minutes later, the parents decided to go back upstairs to fetch some warm clothing for their shivering children. They were still above ground when the bomb exploded. The farmer survived, sheltered by one of the few pieces of wall to survive a blast that demolished every farm building and set fire to an avenue of oak trees, but his wife was killed instantly. She was the only German fatality from the raid. The remaining aircraft re-formed, with Mick Martin taking over as leader, but ran into low-lying mist and fog over the Dortmund area, at times reducing visibility to as little as 500 yards. The haze was reflecting the moonlight and ‘making the whole scene appear like a silver veil. We could see practically no ground detail when flying into-moon.’ They were supposed to bomb from 150 feet at two-minute intervals, but the fog and haze meant that the only time they could actually spot the canal was when they were already directly overhead and too late to drop their bombs on it. They kept circling, hoping for a break or eddy in the fog that would give them a sight of the target, but with no sign of the Mosquitos that were supposed to act as ‘can-openers’, suppressing the air defences, the Lancasters were making themselves ‘sitting ducks for the air defences putting up a wall of flak’, and the prowling night-fighters. They soon lost another aircraft, when Mick Martin’s rear gunner suddenly called out, ‘There goes Jerry Wilson.’ Flight Lieutenant Harold ‘Jerry’ Wilson’s Lancaster had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crashed into the canal bank, killing himself and all his crew. ‘There was only us and Micky Martin left by then from our formation,’ Les Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland, says. ‘It was a desperate scene unfolding around us; it was pretty scary.’ Soon afterwards, squinting into the fog, Sutherland froze as ‘trees atop a ridge just appeared in front of me, rushing towards me. Someone else screamed for Les to climb but it was too late.’ Sydney Hobday, the crew’s navigator, remembered the moment all too clearly, ‘To my horror,’ he says, ‘I saw the treetops straight ahead and thought we had at last “bought it” – after quite a good run for our money I admit!’ The trees hit them on the port side, puncturing the radiators of both port engines and damaging the tail. Both port engines overheated and had to be shut down, and the starboard inner engine then began to fail as well. Knight fought to control his badly damaged aircraft as Edward ‘Johnny’ Johnson – not the member of Joe McCarthy’s crew married to Gwyn, but another bomb-aimer with a similar name – jettisoned the 12,000-pound bomb, praying that the delayed-action fuse would work, because, if not, they’d be blown to pieces as it detonated. It fell away silently and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The crew also threw out their guns and ammunition to lose weight as Knight tried to nurse his battered aircraft back to England, alternately feathering the port engines to cool them and then briefly restarting them as the aircraft dropped towards stalling speed. He called his rear gunner, Harry ‘Obie’ O’Brien, forward to haul on the exposed controls from the starboard rudder pedal to ease the strain on Knight’s leg as he battled to hold the damaged aircraft in straight and level flight, but it was a hopeless task. With the two port engines virtually useless and the starboard ones over-revving as they strained to keep the Lancaster airborne, the aircraft was constantly being pushed to port and still losing altitude, with the glide angle increasing steadily. Fear of what was to come gripped them all. ‘There was no smoke or flames,’ Sutherland says, ‘but we knew we didn’t have long.’ As they passed over Den Ham in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Knight realised he couldn’t control the aircraft much longer and ordered his men to bale out. Looking out, Sutherland thought they were over water, but once more it was just the moonlight reflecting from the layer of cloud below them, and when he pulled back the blackout curtain he saw the ground in front of them. The crew baled out one by one. ‘Bomb-aimer going, cheers, Les,’ Edward Johnson said. ‘Cheers and good luck, Johnny,’ Knight said, his voice showing none of the emotion he must have been feeling. Obie O’Brien also said his farewell and baled out from the rear hatch, and was followed moments later by Sutherland, who called, ‘Mid-upper gunner going out the back door, Les.’ He didn’t have his parachute on, but ‘quickly clipped it on and just jumped out the back door’. The extra gunner, Les Woollard, on his first flight with Knight’s crew, jumped at the same time, though Sutherland lost sight of him at once. Navigator Sidney Hobday baled out of the hatch in the nose and flight engineer Bob Kellow followed a heartbeat later. He’d disconnected his intercom and so couldn’t speak to Knight, but gave him a thumbs-up sign, and saw Knight’s answering signal before he tumbled out of the hatch. None of Knight’s crew had ever talked about being shot down. Sutherland says: I don’t think we ever talked about the possibility, or what we would do. I remember Johnson always wore special shoes whenever we flew low level so he could walk out if we came down – he was prepared. But for me, whatever was going to happen would happen. I didn’t think too much about it. No one talked about it. We just hoped that the op would be over quickly, and we’d survive and get back to the Mess for a beer! However, the first thing that every aircrew member found out about a new aircraft was ‘how to leave the plane in a hurry’. At one time crews practised baling out from a static aircraft on the ground, but ‘this produced so many twisted and broken limbs that it was put on hold’. An instructor at OTU – the Operational Training Unit, which all ranks had to attend before joining a unit on active service – also had a warning for trainee aircrew who baled out over the UK: ‘Remember to hold on to the ripcord handle and bring it back or you will be charged five bob for its replacement!’ Like the rest of his crew, Sutherland had never used a parachute before, but after a heart-stopping pause when he pulled on the ripcord, his chute opened safely. ‘I hit the ground and stood up,’ he says. ‘A few hours before I’d been in England, now I was standing in enemy territory. It was quite a shock. I thought about my family getting a telegram to say I was missing, what would they think?’ As he did so, he saw Les Knight attempting a forced landing a quarter of a mile away, but sadly, by waiting for his crew to bale out, time had run out for Knight himself, ‘a classic example of the pilot sacrificing his life to allow the others to escape’. His stricken aircraft hit the trees, crashed and burst into flames, killing Knight instantly. His body, still at the controls, was retrieved by Dutch civilians who, in defiance of the German occupiers, buried him after conducting a funeral for him. ‘I owe my life to Les,’ Sutherland says. ‘He kept the aircraft steady as long as he could, so we could get out. Without him, I’d have been dead.’ Sidney Hobday, who was a Lloyds clerk in peacetime, had also landed safely – albeit 30 feet up in the branches of a tree – and saw his skipper’s last moments. ‘I imagine that when he let go of the stick, the plane dived straight to the deck … I shall never forget how he wished me good luck before I left … he was a good lad.’ Mick Martin had lost sight of Knight’s aircraft in the fog and did not know what had happened to him. He eventually identified the target ‘after stooging around for about an hour, but it was very hairy’, and he had to make thirteen passes over it before his bomb-aimer was sufficiently confident to release their bomb. Meanwhile, more of their comrades were being shot down. Flying Officer William Divall’s Lancaster came down a few miles away after being hit by flak. Having dropped his bomb into the canal, Divall crashed into the bank and the ensuing explosion flattened the trees flanking the canal and blew the rear turret, with the rear gunner’s body still inside it, right across to the opposite bank. All the crew died in the blast. Flight Lieutenant Ralf Allsebrook’s Lancaster was also hit by flak as he flew over the canal. A veteran of two tours with 49 Squadron, Allsebrook had joined 617 Squadron a few days after the Dams raid, and was not to survive his first op over Germany with them. He tried to make an emergency landing, but hit the roof of a house and then smashed into a crane on the canal bank, decapitating himself and killing his crew. The lethal anti-aircraft fire and the crashes caused by low-level flying in such poor visibility made it unsurprising that only two bombs – dropped by Mick Martin’s and Dave Shannon’s crews – landed anywhere near the target, one hitting the towpath, the other falling in the water without doing any significant damage to the canal. Even worse, the abortive raid had seen five of the eight Lancasters shot down or crash, leaving a trail of burning aircraft across the German countryside, and causing the loss of forty-one men’s lives, including thirteen of the survivors of the Dams raid that had made the squadron’s reputation. The op had also claimed the lives of David Maltby and his crew the previous night, making a total of six out of nine aircraft and their crews lost – a loss rate of two-thirds compared with the 5 per cent losses that the supposedly more vulnerable Main Force bombers were suffering on their mass raids on heavily defended German cities. The first two major ops by 617 Squadron had therefore cost the lives of fourteen crews. The death rate on the Dortmund–Ems Canal op was equivalent to that of the triumphantly received Dams raid, and as Johnny Johnson remarked, ‘In many ways it was not dissimilar to the Dams, apart from those very heavy defences and the difficulty of getting at the target. That was the killer.’ Yet while the Dams raid had been hailed as one of the greatest successes of the war, the failure to destroy the target this time caused Dortmund–Ems to be regarded as an unmitigated disaster. The margins between great success and total failure were proving to be vanishingly small. Johnny Johnson was ill and had played no part in the raid, but hearing about the losses, he was desperate to find out if his pilot, Joe McCarthy, and the rest of his usual crew had been involved. ‘It was a worrying time, these men were my family,’ he says, but to his great relief he found that they had not taken part in the raid, with both McCarthy and Les Munro temporarily grounded on the orders of the Medical Officer. The squadron’s relative inactivity since the Dams raid and the attendant ‘one op’ gibes from other squadrons may have led to the target and the method of attacking it being hastily chosen, with too little thought about the potential pitfalls, and as successor to the now legendary Guy Gibson, George Holden may also have been eager to win his own spurs. ‘There was a sense that we had to get back on ops,’ Johnny Johnson now says. ‘Squadron Leader Holden wanted to do it to keep the reputation of the squadron and its role in special operations. Maybe the accolades we had received because of the Dams op meant we had to get on and do more, be more successful. But those accolades were a hindrance here.’ Only six crews – including those of Mick Martin, Dave Shannon, Les Munro and Joe McCarthy, who were veterans of the Dams raids – now remained on the squadron. Desperate to atone for the failures, Martin volunteered to return to the target the following night, flying solo to complete the job, but he was overruled by his superiors and, apart from an abortive attempt to bomb the Anth?or railway viaduct in southern France the following night, the Dortmund–Ems Canal raid proved to be 617 Squadron’s last for almost two months. The heavy losses they had suffered at the canal were proof that their signature operations – low-level, night-time, precision-bombing raids – were no longer viable. They had been lucky at the dams, albeit still with the loss of almost half their force. At the Dortmund–Ems Canal their luck had run out. ‘It was a big blow to the squadron,’ one crewman says. ‘We lost so many that night that it seemed to affect the thinking of the powers that be. It was a very traumatic experience.’ There were to be no more low-level attacks. From now on 617 Squadron would operate at high level, using a new tachometric precision bombsight, the SABS (Stabilised Automatic Bomb Sight), to ensure accuracy. It was one of the world’s first computerised bombsights and a complex, hand-built piece of equipment, consisting of a mechanical computer mounted to the left of the bomb-aimer and a stabilised sighting head fitted with an optical graticule. The sight was connected to a Bombing Direction Indicator (BDI) mounted on the pilot’s instrument panel, which indicated the amount of left or right turn required to bring the sight to bear on the target. Once the sight had been programmed with the necessary data – the aircraft’s speed and altitude, and the wind-speed and direction – the bomb-aimer had only to keep the target centred in the graticule and the sight itself would then automatically release the bomb at the right moment. However, while they could achieve impressive accuracy with the sight, and attacking from height made them less vulnerable to flak, it also made them much more vulnerable to German night-fighters, particularly when attacked from below, the Lancaster’s blindspot. In the early stages of the war, anti-aircraft guns had claimed far more victims than fighters, but that was quickly reversed and by 1943, Bomber Command losses to night-fighters were twice those caused by flak. German night-fighter pilot Peter Spoden – these days a great-grandfather living in a care home with his wife – brought down twenty-four four-engine British bombers during the war, and he cries as he reflects on the deaths of the crews inside them, young men of his own age. The aircraft he shot down never even knew he was there: he approached from behind and below them, flew 50 or 60 feet underneath their fuselage and unleashed the two upward-firing guns the German pilots called Schr?ge Musik. (Translating literally as ‘slanting music’, Schr?ge Musik was their slang term for jazz.) Spoden recalls one night where he was talked in by his radio operator and suddenly saw ‘this black shadow above me … in ten minutes I shot down three Lancasters – I was completely out of my mind.’ However, the firing wasn’t all one way. One Lancaster gunner has vivid memories of shooting down a fighter at close quarters: ‘I could see my bullets hitting him. I couldn’t miss him – not at that range.’ 617 Squadron’s shocking rate of losses had led to their sarcastic nickname ‘The One Op Squadron’ being replaced with a new one, ‘The Suicide Squadron’, and the deaths of so many crewmates dealt what could easily have been a terminal blow to morale. ‘Those losses had a big effect, there was a sense of distress and shock, and possibly even dissatisfaction that we were asked to do something which should never have been attempted,’ Johnny Johnson says. But although morale was inevitably affected in the short term, confidence soon recovered. ‘Morale slumped because they were rather staggering losses,’ Larry Curtis adds, ‘but one did tend to throw these things off very quickly. Going from low level to high level made all the difference; losses were very slight after that.’ * * * While their comrades were trying to come to terms with the disaster, two of the survivors of Les Knight’s crash had been captured, but the remaining five, including Sidney Hobday and Fred Sutherland, were on the ground in the Occupied Netherlands, trying to evade the Nazis. They were separated from each other, and the knowledge that he was now alone in the heart of enemy territory, facing capture or perhaps even death if he were found, almost paralysed Hobday at first. However, realising that the greatest danger of discovery lay in remaining close to the wreckage of his downed aircraft, he climbed down from the tree he had landed in and set off south, away from the burning Lancaster. He walked through dew-soaked meadows and along a canal bank, carrying on until it started to get light, when he hid in a small wood. However, his feet were soaked, and, sitting on the wet grass, he began to feel very cold. ‘Not wishing to get pneumonia,’ he began walking again, but as he approached a metalled road, the sound of galloping hoofs terrified him and he dived behind the nearest hedgerow, imagining ‘a couple of dozen mounted Jerries looking for me’. When he risked peering out, he saw that the ‘hoof-beats’ were actually the noise made by some Dutch children’s wooden clogs as they ran along the road to school. As he waited for them to pass, he glanced at his watch. It was eight-thirty in the morning. ‘Twelve hours before, I had been strumming the piano in the Mess.’ Before setting out along the road, he took off his brevet and his other RAF markings, trying to make his battledress look as civilian as possible. Hobday knew that his name and those of his comrades decorated after the Dams raid had been published in the English newspapers, and as a result they had all been put on a Nazi blacklist. He knew that if he was taken prisoner, he was unlikely to remain alive for long. He had not walked far when he saw two farmworkers cycling towards him. He bent down, pretending to tie his laces, but they stopped. Not speaking Dutch, he couldn’t understand them, but after a few moments of gut-gnawing indecision, he decided to risk telling them who we was. He said ‘RAF’ several times without any sign of recognition from them, and then began flapping his arms about to mimic flying. They now seemed to understand and, having looked carefully up and down the road, gave him half their food, ‘black bread with some queer stuff in it which I could not stomach’. He gave them a couple of cigarettes in return from the packs he always carried on ops, in case of just such an eventuality. Heartened by their friendliness and realising the impossibility of crossing Europe alone and unaided, Hobday decided to seek more help from civilians where he could, hoping they would put him in touch with the Dutch Resistance. After a few more hours of walking he tried to hitch a ride in a little cart, but the driver shook his head, indicating by sign language that the Germans would slit his throat if they caught him. However, he gave Hobday some more black bread before driving off. A little further down the road, he saw the same cart driver in urgent conversation with a woman, who then passed Hobday on her bicycle a couple of times, studying him carefully without speaking. Once more he was left fearing betrayal to the Nazis, but he kept walking and was then overtaken by some young men, who spoke to him in ‘slow schoolboy English’. They gave him some apples and a tall man then brought him a civilian suit. It would have ‘fitted a man five inches taller than myself,’ Hobday said, but he changed into it and the Dutchmen took his RAF uniform away. They also insisted on shaving off his moustache, saying it made him look ‘too English’. Hobday was then told to make his way alone to a railway station 10 miles away, as it was too dangerous for them to accompany him. By the time he arrived, he was close to exhaustion. He hadn’t slept for thirty hours and had walked for another twelve with almost no rest. The tall man was waiting for him and gave him a train ticket to a town 100 kilometres away with a list of the times of the trains he had to catch. He also gave him a note in Dutch that said: ‘This man is deaf and dumb. Please help him.’ The journey tested Hobday’s nerves to breaking point. He first almost blundered into a carriage reserved for Wehrmacht troops and then, when he found an empty carriage, a ‘German Luftwaffe man and his girl’ got in and sat next to him. Luckily they were more interested in each other than the strange man sharing the compartment, and with the aid of his ‘deaf and dumb’ note, Hobday made it safely to his destination, where a young member of the Dutch Resistance met him. Having questioned Hobday searchingly to make sure he was not a German spy, he led him out of town to a place where eight members of the Resistance were in hiding, living in a crude hut deep in the heart of dense woodland. They had been carrying out minor acts of sabotage and raiding German stores, assembling ‘quite a collection’ of firearms, explosives, uniforms, blank visas and identity cards. Twenty-four hours later, Hobday was reunited with Fred Sutherland, who had also managed to make contact with the Resistance. Fred had walked a few miles from the Lancaster’s crash site when, realising that ‘walking all the way to the south of Europe was never going to work’, he hid behind a barn and then jumped out as a girl about his own age was cycling towards him. ‘She nearly jumped out of her skin!’ he says. ‘She couldn’t speak any English so I tried to communicate with sign language that the Germans would cut my throat if they caught me.’ She took him to a boy who could speak a few words of English, and he contacted the Resistance. ‘After the war, I was told that this girl had actually been dating a German soldier!’ Sutherland says. ‘So I guess I was lucky because she didn’t tell anyone.’ Fred Sutherland Sutherland and Hobday were comfortable enough living in the hut, sleeping on stolen German blankets and straw beds. Their food was largely potatoes, although one day a Dutchman caught some tiny eels in a nearby canal. The Resistance had begun making arrangements for the two RAF men to be returned to England via France and Spain, but the long chain of helpers was vulnerable to infiltration or arrest by the Nazis, and it proved a lengthy and fear-ridden process. Twice they were almost discovered, once when German troops began holding infantry manoeuvres in the woods, and the other when they escaped a Gestapo raid on the hut by the skin of their teeth. After three weeks, frantic to contact his wife, who he knew would believe that he had been killed, Hobday had to be prevented from setting off for Spain on his own, but a week later arrangements were finally in place. The night before their departure, their hosts staged a farewell party for them, fuelled by a bottle of gin and some beer. The next day they set off, first travelling to Rotterdam, escorted by a woman dressed as a nurse. They then travelled to Paris by train, armed with new fake identity papers showing that they were labourers for the Todt Organisation working on an aerodrome near Marseille. (As the Third Reich’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Fritz Todt ran the entire German construction industry. His Organisation Todt built the West Wall that guarded the coast of German-occupied Europe, as well as roads and other large-scale engineering projects in occupied Europe.) They went via Brussels and had ‘some shaky moments’ at the two frontiers, surviving a close examination of their fake identity papers at a German checkpoint. When the German officer held them up to the light for a better look, Sutherland’s hands were shaking so much that he had to ball his fists and brace his elbows against his side to hide them. ‘My heart was pounding and I was really scared,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to be nonchalant when you are facing your enemy.’ However, with the help of their Dutch escorts, who, at considerable risk to their own lives, kept up a stream of distracting conversation with the German frontier guards, the fake papers passed scrutiny. ‘I can’t begin to describe the courage of the people who helped us in Holland and France,’ Sutherland says. ‘They took us into their homes, fed us and cared for us at tremendous risk to themselves and their families. The Germans had infiltrated the Underground and people did not know who they could trust, and yet still they helped us, even knowing that, while we would likely be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, they and their families would be shot.’ They remained in Paris for nearly a fortnight, staying in the tiny flat of an elderly French lady, at huge risk to herself, and eventually they were taken to a clearing house for escaping aircrew and PoWs. There they were given yet more new papers and then set off in small groups for the journey to the Pyrenees. When they arrived at Pau, they got themselves French-style berets and then took a small train through ‘the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen’ to Sainte-Marie and were driven on from there in a car powered by gas made from charcoal. At the foot of the Pyrenees they lodged overnight in a barn where other escapers were already waiting and began the climb of the mountains the next day. Apart from their guide and his dog, there were ten escapers: three Americans, three Frenchmen, a Dutchman, an Australian, the Canadian Sutherland and Hobday, the only Briton. Following weeks in hiding, on a very poor diet and with little chance of exercise, Hobday was very unfit. Even worse, after climbing for six hours over the rocky paths, his shoes fell apart. Fortunately the guide had a spare pair, though they were too small and ‘hurt like hell’. They climbed all night, a perilous ascent with no light to guide them, following narrow, twisting paths with the mountainside rising sheer above them on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Only the thought of the fate that awaited them if they were found by the Nazis spurred them on. They had little rest and even less food, and suffered a frustrating and frightening delay when a shepherd, recruited by the guide to show them a short cut to the Spanish side of the mountains, became completely lost and left them in driving rain 7,000 feet up on the mountainside, while he tried to discover where they were. They had started climbing the mountains at seven o’clock on Wednesday evening and did not reach the Spanish side until the Saturday morning. Having already passed through the Netherlands and right across France, in constant fear of discovery by the Gestapo, they had then dragged themselves right over the Pyrenees. Their epic escape was ‘the toughest thing I’ve ever done’, Sutherland says. Completely spent, they rested for the remainder of that morning and swallowed some food and wine, though it ‘came up as fast as it went down’. In the afternoon they walked down to the nearest village, Orbaizeta. By then Hobday was so stiff he could hardly walk, and his companions were little better. Although Spain was ruled by Franco’s fascist regime, it was professedly neutral in the war, but there was a tense atmosphere as they encountered the Spanish carabineros for the first time. However, they treated the escapers well enough, and they remained in the ‘dirty little village’ until the Monday, though Hobday had to sell his watch to pay for food for Sutherland and himself. The shop where they ate was ‘a general store, very much like the Wild West saloons of the old cowboy films, complete with liquor, shepherds, singing and a bit of good-natured scrapping. On the Sunday they all came in with their week’s money and proceeded to get rid of it on booze.’ The place was filthy and there were pigs and chickens wandering everywhere, indoors and out. The escapees were then taken to Pamplona, where they were met by the Red Cross, who escorted them to Madrid, a journey that took a further fortnight. There staff at the British Embassy gave them a train ticket to Gibraltar, where, to their enormous relief, they were at last back on British soil. Hobday’s first action was to cable his wife to tell her he was alive. They were flown home a few days later, on 6 December 1943, almost three months after they had been shot down. If Hobday needed any reminder of how fortunate they had been to come through that marathon journey unscathed, the fate of a Dutchman he had befriended provided it. He attempted to cross the Pyrenees a week after Hobday but was caught in a snowstorm and got lost. Suffering from frostbite, he was captured by a German frontier guard and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Fred Sutherland, speaking from his home in Canada seventy years on, perhaps encapsulates the emotions of all those wartime evaders: The whole experience was quite unreal, just like living in a movie. It was all very nerve-racking and I didn’t rate my chances of making it home, but it was worth a try. The Dutch people were risking their own lives to help me. Without them I would have been captured or dead and I can never thank them enough for that. And when I was on the ground – seeing the Nazis close up – that’s when I realised we had to win this war; regardless of the cost. * * * For the families of the dead, the ramifications of the disastrous Dortmund–Ems raid went on for months as they struggled to come to terms with their loss, and to understand how their loved ones had perished. David Maltby’s father, Ettrick, received a letter from the mother of Maltby’s navigator, Vivian Nicholson, desperate to find out how her own son had died. She was heartbreakingly eloquent in her expression of her grief. ‘I scarcely know how to write this letter,’ Elizabeth Nicholson wrote. We would like to know the true facts of what they did that night and would be gratefully thankful for any news you could give us. We have a photo of your gallant son and our boy together. It is indeed a terrible wound for us to see them so young, happy and beautiful. Our boy was conscientious, very guarded about his duties. Please, if your son told you anything [about our son], we would indeed be grateful if you could let us know. I know you will understand my yearning for news, and I have the worry of our second son aged 19 on the submarine HMS Seanymph. The world owes so much to these gallant young men. We can only wait patiently till we can understand why they are taken from our homes, where their places can never be filled. Many of the young men taking to the skies that night had left ‘last letters’ to be delivered to their loved ones if they were killed. Maltby’s wireless operator, Antony Stone, was no exception. His mother received her son’s final letter shortly after his death. ‘I will have ended happily,’ he wrote, ‘so have no fears of how I ended as I have the finest crowd of fellows with me, and if Skipper goes I will be glad to go with him.’ Many more letters, to parents of the bereaved, and from those who had made the ultimate sacrifice, would be delivered before the war was over. CHAPTER 3 (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) Press On, Regardless (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22) Bomber Command’s Main Force had continued to pound Germany during the autumn and early winter of 1943, including a raid on Kassel on 22/23 October that caused a week-long firestorm in the town and killed 10,000 people, and the launch of the ‘Battle of Berlin’, a six-month bombing campaign against the German capital, beginning on 18/19 November. Over the course of the campaign some 9,000 sorties would be flown and almost 30,000 tons of bombs dropped. Bomber Harris’s claim that though ‘it will cost us between 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war’ proved optimistic; the aircraft losses were over twice as heavy and the bombing campaign did not destroy the city, nor the morale of its population, nor the Nazis’ willingness to continue the war. In contrast, the heavy losses sustained by Main Force during this period undoubtedly had an effect on morale. Following George Holden’s death at Dortmund–Ems, Mick Martin had been put in temporary charge of 617 Squadron, but because he had jumped two ranks from Flight Lieutenant direct to Wing Commander, some felt his face still did not fit, and on 10 November 1943 he was replaced by a new commander, a tall, dark-haired and gaunt-faced figure: Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire. Still only twenty-six, Cheshire was one of the RAF’s most decorated pilots and its youngest Group Captain, who had taken a drop in rank in order to command 617. Cheshire made a dramatic entrance to his new squadron. Gunner Chan Chandler was in his room at the Petwood Hotel when there was a shot directly outside his window. ‘I looked out and saw this chap with a revolver in his hand, called him a bloody lunatic and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. He replied that he thought the place needed waking up! It turned out he was the new CO and my first words to him were to call him a bloody lunatic! However, we got on famously after that.’ Leonard Cheshire At his first squadron meeting Cheshire told his men that ‘If you get into trouble when you’re off duty, I will do what I can to help you. If you get into trouble on duty, I’ll make life a hell of a lot worse for you.’ ‘So we all knew where we stood from the start,’ Johnny Johnson says. Far more approachable and friendly than Guy Gibson, Cheshire was soon highly thought of by all. ‘He developed the techniques for marking, for instance,’ Johnson says, ‘so the efficiency of the squadron was improved. That was always his objective: to get things absolutely right.’ Larry Curtis found Cheshire ‘very quiet, very relaxed, but at the same time, you did what you were told; he just approached it in a different way.’ Malcolm ‘Mac’ Hamilton witnessed this new approach when he joined the squadron. His crew had achieved an impressive bombing accuracy of 70 yards before joining 617, and when he met Cheshire for the first time, Cheshire said, ‘Oh, Hamilton, I see your crew have won the 5 Group bombing trophy three months running.’ Hamilton acknowledged this, ‘putting my chest out, because I was quite proud’. Cheshire frowned. ‘Well, I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you six weeks to get your accuracy down to twenty-seven yards, or you’re off the squadron.’ He was only half-joking. On 617 Squadron, everything revolved around accuracy in bombing. Before they were allowed on ops, every new crew was required to carry out at least three six-bomb practice drops on the ranges at Wainfleet on the Wash in Lincolnshire. The crew’s accuracy was assessed and the results added to the Bombing Error Ladder kept by the Bombing Leader. Crews with the highest accuracy – and the results of even the most experienced crews were continually updated – were assigned the most ops and the most important roles on those ops, and those with poorer records would find themselves left out, or even transferred off the squadron altogether, if their results did not improve. Cheshire was relentless in raising standards, but he set himself the highest standards of all, and was universally admired and even loved by the men under his command. ‘He was a great man,’ Johnny Johnson says, ‘and the finest commander I served under.’ * * * In the autumn of 1943, during the continuing lull in ops that followed the disaster of Dortmund–Ems, 617 had been practising high-level bombing with new 12,000-pound ‘Blockbuster’ HC bombs – the equivalent of three 4,000-pound ‘cookies’ bolted together. One of the squadron’s rear gunners, Tom Simpson, was lugging his Browning machine guns to the firing range one morning with 400 rounds of ammunition draped around his neck, when a ‘silver-haired, mature gentleman’ approached. A civilian on the base was an unusual sight, but the man seemed to know his way around. He asked if he could walk with Simpson and helped to carry one of the guns. After Simpson had installed the guns in the practice turret and fired off a few bursts himself, he noticed the stranger’s ‘deep blue eyes gleaming’ and asked, ‘Would you like to sit in here and have a little dab yourself?’ The man didn’t need a second invitation. Having watched him fire both guns singly, Simpson invited him to fire off the last hundred rounds using both guns together. After doing so, he was ‘trembling with excitement and pleasure’ as he climbed out of the turret. ‘That was really fantastic,’ he said. ‘I had no idea of the magnitude and firepower a rear gunner has at his disposal.’ Only later did Simpson realise that the silver-haired, mature gentleman was Barnes Wallis. When he mentioned the incident to Mick Martin, he told him that Wallis was developing even bigger and better bombs for the squadron. Within a few months they would all have the proof of that. Barnes Wallis Wallis, whose wife’s sister and brother-in-law had been killed by a German bomb in 1940, had already devised Upkeep – the ‘bouncing bomb’ used on the Dams raid. Forever innovative and forward-looking, he had never believed that carpet bombing could break German resolve, any more than the Blitz had broken Britain’s will to fight. Instead, he had argued from the start for precision bombing of high-value economic, military and infrastructure targets, and designed a series of weapons capable of doing so. He had been given the task of creating newer, ever more destructive weapons that could penetrate and destroy heavily fortified concrete bunkers and other targets, previously invulnerable to conventional attack. A vegetarian non-smoker, Barnes Wallis came from a respectable middle-class background – his father was a doctor and his grandfather a priest – yet at sixteen years old, he had set his face against the advice of his parents and teachers and left school to take up an apprenticeship as an engineer. In later years, his daughter Mary attributed that decision to an experience when he was very young and his mother had taken him to a foundry to see the men and machinery at work. ‘The size, power, the noise of machinery in the light of the flames from the foundry furnace’ may have made a lasting impression on him. Whatever the reasons, Wallis’s career path was set, though at first he showed more interest in the sea than in the air, training as a marine engineer, before being recruited by Vickers to work on airship design. An engineering genius, he worked as the chief designer on the R100 airship, ‘a perfect silver fish gliding through the air … a luxury liner compared with the sardine-tin passenger aircraft of today’. Having pioneered the geodetic system of construction in airships (more commonly called geodesic) – a latticework system of construction that produced a very light metal structure that nonetheless possessed great strength – he went on to apply it to military aircraft too, first using it on the airframe of the Wellington bomber. Despite his considerable achievements, he was a warm, humane and profoundly modest man. ‘We technical men like to keep in the background,’ he said, and a friend and work colleague remarked that: ‘He would sooner talk about his garden than himself.’ Although he had designed aircraft, Wallis knew very little about bomb construction, but right from the outset of the war he resolved to put that right as quickly as possible. One of his early discoveries was that the explosive power of a bomb is proportional to the cube of the weight of the charge it carries, so that, for example, a 2,000-pound bomb would have eight times the impact of a bomb half its weight. He also learned that the pressure wave from an explosion is transmitted far more efficiently through the ground or through water than it is through air. Both of those discoveries were reflected in the design of the ‘Upkeep’, ‘Tallboy’ and ‘Grand Slam’ bombs he subsequently produced. In addition to the new bombs Barnes Wallis was producing, 617 Squadron were now using a new and far more accurate bombsight. Shortly before Leonard Cheshire’s arrival, 617 had begun training with the sophisticated new SABS. Its only major drawback was that it required a long, straight and level run to the dropping point, reducing the pilots’ ability to make evasive manoeuvres and increasing their vulnerability to flak and fighter attack. Wireless operator Larry Curtis always dreaded that vulnerable time, flying straight and level with the bomb-aimer in virtual control of the aircraft: As long as you were busy, you never thought about anything except the job you were doing. But when it came to the bombing run, and to a great extent your duties were finished, it was then that you became aware that you were very vulnerable and people were actually trying to kill you. In the radio operator’s cabin there was a steel pole – some sort of support – and I used to hang on to it like grim death. I’ve always said if anyone could find that steel pole, they’d find my fingerprints embedded in it – and I’m not joking. It did come home very forcefully; I’m sure everyone would agree that was the time you dreaded. There was no man on the squadron who did not feel fear at times, but, says one of the squadron’s wireless operators, ‘it was all about pushing fears to one side. I think if anyone said they were never afraid, I’d say they were either not there, or they’re lying. There was no possibility you couldn’t be scared at some points.’ Even the squadron’s greatest heroes were not immune to fear. Wilfred Bickley, an air gunner who joined 617 at the same time as the great Leonard Cheshire, VC, once asked him, ‘Do you ever get scared?’ ‘Of course I get scared,’ Cheshire said. Bickley broke into a broad grin. ‘Thanks for that, you’ve made my day.’ At a reunion after the war, Cheshire also said to one of his former men on 617 Squadron: ‘I could have been a pilot or at a pinch a navigator, but could never have done the other crew jobs; there was too much time to think, to be isolated, to dwell on what was going on around you. I never felt fear as a pilot, but as a passenger, I certainly felt it!’ * * * The use of the new SABS bombsights in training on the ranges at Wainfleet had led to a huge improvement in accuracy, but the first real chance to assess their effectiveness under operational conditions came in raids against Hitler’s new ‘V-weapons’. ‘V’ stood for Vergeltungswaffen (‘vengeance weapons’), and these ‘terror weapons’ were the Nazis’ chosen method of retaliation for the relentless Allied bombing of German cities. Lacking the heavy bombers and air superiority required to inflict similar damage on Britain, Hitler had authorised the development of three V-weapons: the V-1 ‘flying bombs’ – an early forerunner of modern-day Cruise missiles, christened ‘buzz-bombs’ or ‘doodlebugs’ by Londoners – the V-2 Feuerteufel (‘Fire Devil’) rocket, and the V-3 ‘Supergun’. Reinforced underground sites were being constructed in the Pas de Calais, in occupied France, where the weapons could be assembled and then launched against Britain. Most of the work was carried out by the forced labour of concentration camp inmates, PoWs, Germans rejected for military service and men and women from the Nazi-occupied countries. They were slave labourers, worked round the clock and fed near-starvation rations, and many did not survive. Destruction of the plants where the V-1s were being manufactured and the ramps from which they were to be launched had become an increasingly urgent priority. 617’s aircrews were briefed about the sites and what they meant. ‘We were trying to obliterate them before they were even made.’ Intelligence on the German V-weapon sites came both from reports by French Resistance members of unusual building activity, and from RAF large-scale photographic reconnaissance missions, which covered the entire northern French coast for up to 50 kilometres inland. Sporadic attacks were launched by Main Force squadrons but inflicted only superficial damage. The task of finding and eliminating the V-weapon sites was made harder by the camouflage used by the Germans – some nets covering buildings were ‘painted to look like roads and small buildings’. The wooded terrain in which most of the weapons were sited also hindered attacks, but the biggest problem was the poor visibility and persistent fogs that shrouded the Channel coast of Occupied France for many winter weeks. On the night of 16/17 December, 617 Squadron joined the assault on Hitler’s vengeance weapons, with a raid on a site at Flixecourt, south of Abbeville, where they were led into battle for the first time by Leonard Cheshire. A system of markers was use to aid accuracy in navigation and bombing. Parachute markers that floated slowly down were used to mark both turning points on the route to the target and the target itself, and target indicators, burning in different colours, were also utilised. On this op, a Mosquito from Pathfinder Force – the specialist squadrons that carried out target marking for Main Force ops – was marking the target from high level using Oboe (the ground-controlled, blind-bombing system that directed a narrow radio beam towards the target). However, the target indicators it dropped were 350 yards from the centre of the target, and such was 617 Squadron’s accuracy with their new SABS – their average error was less than 100 yards – that, although they peppered the markers with their 12,000-pound bombs, none of them hit the target. Although unsuccessful, the failure in target marking at Flixecourt did have positive consequences, for it served as the catalyst for Cheshire and his 617 Squadron crews to begin lobbying for a change in the marking system. Deeply frustrated by the failure of the raid, despite the phenomenal accuracy of their bombing, Mick Martin argued vehemently that it was pointless for the squadron to be dependent on markers dropped from height when flying missions that risked, and often cost, the lives of 617’s aircrews. Far better, he said, for himself or somebody else in the squadron to take on the responsibility of marking the target at low level, but at first ‘Nobody seemed to listen,’ one of his crewmates recalled, ‘and I think Mick got sick of volunteering and making his suggestions.’ However, Leonard Cheshire may already have been thinking along similar lines, and he became an equally fervent advocate of low-level marking. The 5 Group commander, Air Vice Marshal Ralph Cochrane, lent his support to the idea, driven in part at least by his intense personal rivalry with Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, the commander of 8 Group, which included the Pathfinder Force. Cochrane lobbied hard for a trial of the low-level system and also argued forcibly that ‘his’ 617 Squadron could mark and destroy targets that were beyond the capabilities of 8 Group and its Pathfinders. Cochrane’s lobbying eventually proved successful, but if it was to be anything more than a short-term experiment, 617 would have to back up his words with actions. Attempts to follow up the Flixecourt raid with a series of further attacks on V-weapon sites that December were aborted because of bad weather and poor visibility, but such conditions were, of course, no deterrent to the construction of the unmanned V-1 flying bombs that would eventually strike London. The squadron strength for the ongoing war against the V-weapon sites was boosted in January 1944 by the arrival of several new crews. Among them was one lead by an Irish-American pilot, christened Hubert Knilans but always known as Nick, and so inevitably nicknamed ‘Nicky Nylons’ by his crewmates (nylon stockings, obtainable only across the Atlantic, were a rare commodity during the war, and a welcome gift for women); his good looks and American accent made him a magnet for the English girls. He came from a farming family in Wisconsin, but in 1941 was drafted for US military service. He wanted to be a pilot, not a soldier, but knew that the USAAF required all pilots to have a college degree, so, without telling his parents, he packed a small bag and set off for Canada. He arrived there literally penniless, having spent his last ten cents on a bus ticket from Detroit to the border, but he was following such a well-trodden path that the Canadian immigration officer merely greeted him with ‘I suppose you’ve come to join the Air Force?’ and directed him to the RCAF recruiting office, where he signed on to train as a pilot. He soon developed a taste for the practical jokes that all aircrew seemed to share. In the depths of the bitter Canadian winter, Knilans and a friend would slip out of their barracks at night, sneak up on their comrades pacing up and down on guard duty and, at risk of being shot by trigger-happy or nervous ones, they then let fly with snowballs. The sudden shock caused some of the more nervous to drop their rifles in the snow, and one even collapsed as he whirled round to face his attacker. After completing his flying training, he sailed for England with thousands of other recruits on board the liner Queen Elizabeth. So eager was Britain to receive these volunteers that the medical and other checks they went through were often rudimentary. One New Zealander boarding his ship passed ‘a friendly chap at the gangway asking him how he was as he passed by’. The ‘friendly chap’ turned out to be the medical officer giving each man boarding the ship his final medical examination! After a bomber conversion course, Knilans joined 619 Squadron at Woodhall Spa in June 1943. He flew his first operational mission on the night of 24 July 1943 as Bomber Command launched the Battle of Hamburg, including the first-ever use of ‘Window’ – bundles of thin strips of aluminium foil now called ‘chaff’. Window was dropped in flight to disrupt enemy radar by reflecting the signal and turning their screens to blizzards of ‘snow’. Informed in October 1943 that he was to be transferred to the USAAF, Knilans refused, insisting on remaining with 619 to complete his tour. His eagerness to fly almost cost him his life later that month when his aircraft was targeted by a night-fighter during a raid on Kassel. A stream of tracer shattered the mid-upper turret, temporarily blinding the gunner with shards of Perspex, and another burst fatally wounded the rear gunner, leaving the Lancaster defenceless. Both wings were also hit, but Knilans threw the aircraft into a vicious ‘corkscrew’ that shook off the fighter. It was a heart-stopping, gut-wrenching manoeuvre, especially for rear gunners who, facing backwards, were thrown upwards as if on an out-of-control rollercoaster as the Lancaster dived and then plunged back down as the pilot hauled on the controls to climb again. Despite the damage to his aircraft, the loss of his gunners, and damage to one engine, Knilans insisted on pressing on to bomb the target, before sending some of his crew back to help the wounded gunner. ‘I knew that in an infantry attack, you could not stop to help a fallen comrade,’ he said. ‘You had to complete your charge first. Bomber Command called it “Press on, regardless”.’ Despite damage to his undercarriage, including a flat tyre on the port side, Knilans eventually made a safe landing back at Woodhall Spa, using brakes, throttles, rudders and stick as he battled to keep the aircraft on the runway. He then helped the ambulance crew to remove the blood-soaked body of his rear gunner from the rear turret. He had almost been cut in half by the cannon shells that killed him. The squadron doctor issued Knilans with two heavy-duty sleeping pills so that his sleep would not be disturbed by those horrific memories, but he gave them instead to the WAAF transport driver, a good friend of the dead gunner, who was overcome with grief and unable to drive. Awarded the DSO for his courage, Knilans wore that medal ribbon on his uniform, but not the other British, Canadian and American medals to which he was entitled. ‘I thought it would antagonise others on the same squadron,’ he said, ‘or confirm their prejudices about bragging Yanks.’ Although he had pressed on to the target on that occasion, on another, while flying through a ‘box barrage’ from heavy anti-aircraft gun batteries over Berlin, with flak bursting all around them and fragments from near-misses rattling against the fuselage, his bomb-aimer told him, ‘Sorry Skip, the flare’s dropped into the clouds. We’ll have to go round again.’ ‘You can still see the lousy flare,’ Knilans angrily replied. ‘Now drop the bombs!’ The bomb-aimer got the message, ‘saw’ the flare and dropped the bombs, and they then ‘departed in haste’. Knilans was a popular figure on his squadron, even though he had made a deliberate decision not to become too closely involved with his crewmates. ‘I would have liked to have met their families, but I decided against it. If the crew members became too close to me, it would interfere with my life or death decisions concerning them. A kind welcome by their families would add to my mental burden. It could lead to my crew thinking of me as unfriendly, but it could lead to their lives being saved too.’ By January 1944, Knilans had decided: I did not want to go on bombing civilian populations. There were few front-line soldiers and the flak-battery operators were women, young boys and old men. The cities were filled with workers, their wives and children … This type of bombing had weakened my reliance on my original ideal of restoring happiness to the children of Europe. Here I was going out and killing many of them on each bombing raid … It was an evil deed to drop bombs on them, I thought. It was a necessary evil, though, to overcome the greater evil of Nazism and Fascism. However, keen to remain on ops, he volunteered for 617 Squadron, which instead bombed ‘only single factories, submarine pens and other military targets’, and persuaded his crew to join with him. Two other squadron leaders promptly put the wind up some of them by telling them that 617 was ‘a low-level flying suicide squadron’, but Knilans merely shrugged and told them that he wasn’t concerned about that, since ‘nobody had managed to live long enough to finish a tour’ on their present squadron either. The RAF regarded a loss of around 5 per cent of the aircrews on each combat trip as acceptable and sustainable. After a quick mental calculation, Nick Knilans had ‘figured it out that by the end of a first tour of thirty trips, it would mean 150 per cent of the crews would be lost. Suicide or slow death, it did not make much difference at that stage of the war.’ Two other pilots and their crews from 619 Squadron, Bob Knights and Mac Hamilton, followed his lead, telling him that ‘they did not like bombing cities indiscriminately either’. It was a short move over to 617 Squadron, as it was in the process of transferring to Woodhall Spa, ensuring that Knilans could continue to enjoy the comforts of the Petwood Hotel Officers’ Mess: ‘the best damn foxhole I would ever find for shelter’. Knilans and his crew were allocated Lancaster R-Roger as their regular aircraft while on 617 Squadron. The ground crew thought it should be called ‘The Jolly Roger’ and wanted to paint a scantily dressed pirate girl ‘wearing a skull and cross bones on her hat’, but Knilans refused. ‘I did not want a scantily clad girl or a humorous name painted on the aircraft assigned to me. This flying into combat night after night, to me, was not very funny. It was a cold-blooded battle to kill or be killed.’ Knilans did not lack a sense of humour, however, and ‘carried away one day with the exhilaration of flying at treetop level at 200 mph’, he could not resist buzzing the Petwood Hotel. ‘We roared over the roof two feet above the tiles. It must have shook from end to end.’ It was teatime and a WAAF was just carrying a tray of tea and cakes to the Station Commander’s table. ‘The sudden thunderous roar and rattle caused her to throw the tray into the air. It crashed beside the Group Captain, my Commanding Officer. He was not amused. Wingco Cheshire told me later that he had quite a time keeping me from being court-martialled by my irate CO.’ * * * On Boxing Day 1943 the last great battle of the sea war ended with the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst, but in terms of the final outcome of the war, an event had taken place a month earlier that, though known to only a handful of people at the time, was to prove far more decisive. At the Tehran Conference of 28 November, Roosevelt and Churchill had at last agreed to meet Stalin’s constant demands that a second front should be opened in the land war against Germany, and the invasion of France, code-named Operation Overlord, was set to begin in six months’ time, in June 1944. 617 Squadron’s transfer to their new home, Woodhall Spa, took place in early January 1944. A former out-station of RAF Coningsby, it was now a permanent base in its own right for 617’s crews and their thirty-four Lancasters. If the new base’s prefab buildings were less solid than the brick-built facilities at Scampton and Coningsby, their new airfield at least had three concrete runways and thirty-six heavy-bomber hard-standings, with three hangars, a bomb dump on the northern edge of the airfield and the control tower on the south-eastern side. The roads crossing the Lincolnshire flatlands around the base were all but deserted – petrol was strictly rationed and few had any to spare – but the skies overhead were always busy with aircraft, black as rooks against the sky, though, unlike rooks, the aircraft usually left their roosts at sunset and returned to them at dawn. Officers based at Woodhall Spa were billeted in some style in the Petwood Hotel, originally a furniture magnate’s mansion and built in a half-timbered mock-Tudor style with a massive oak front door, windows with leaded lights and acres of oak panelling. The grounds included majestic elms, rhododendron-lined avenues, manicured lawns, sunken gardens and a magnificent lily pond. There was also an outdoor swimming pool, tennis courts, a golf course, and even a cinema – The Kinema in the Woods, or ‘The Flicks in the Sticks’ as it was christened by 617’s irreverent crews – in a converted sports pavilion on the far side of the Petwood’s grounds. The most highly prized – and highly priced – seats were the front six rows, where you sat in deckchairs instead of conventional cinema seats. The Petwood’s beautiful grounds and timeless feel could almost have made the aircrews forget the war altogether, had ugly reality not intruded so often. As Nick Knilans remarked, ‘One day I would be strolling about in this idyllic setting with a friend and the next day he would be dead.’ Inside the hotel there was a high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room adapted for use as a bar, a billiard room and two lounge areas with roaring log fires, though other parts of the building were sealed off and the most valuable paintings and furniture removed – a wise precaution given the boisterous nature of most off-duty aircrews’ recreations. The Petwood provided the aircrew with a comfortable base to escape the rigours of the war – a luxury the men of Bomber Command held dear. On a visit to one bomber base, the great American correspondent Martha Gellhorn described their preparations for an approaching operation: A few talked, their voices rarely rising above a murmur, but most remained silent, withdrawing into themselves, writing letters, reading pulp novels, or staring into space. Though they were probably reading detective stories or any of the much-used third-rate books that are in their library, they seem to be studying. Because if you read hard enough, you can get away from yourself and everyone else and from thinking about the night ahead. Cheshire himself almost became the squadron’s first casualty at Woodhall Spa while carrying out an air test on 13 January 1944. Just after take-off, he flew into a dense flock of plovers and hit several of the birds. One smashed through the cockpit windscreen, narrowly missing Cheshire, while another struck and injured the flight engineer who was the only other person on board. Cheshire made a low-level circuit and managed to land his damaged aircraft safely. 617 Squadron mythology claims that at least twenty plovers were on the menu at the Petwood Hotel that night! The thin Perspex of the canopy and the bomb-aimer’s ‘fish-bowl’ in the nose were very vulnerable. ‘The last thing you want as you are tearing down the runway at a hundred-plus and about to lift off is a flaming bird exploding through the canopy; for one thing it makes a hell of a bang, and sudden loud noises are not popular in an aircraft, especially in the middle of a take-off.’ If they did hit a bird, the bomb-aimer and the flight engineer were ‘liable to get a faceful of jagged bits of Perspex and a filthy mess of blood, guts and feathers to clear up’, said Gunner Chan Chandler. Bird-strikes were a serious problem and at Scampton, Coningsby and Woodhall Spa there were scarecrows, bird-scarers and regular shooting parties with half a dozen shotgun-toting aircrew touring the perimeter of the base in a van and shooting every bird they saw. ‘There were no rules about it being unsporting to shoot sitting birds – slaughter was the order of the day, and slaughter it was.’ Members of 617 Squadron also relieved the boredom of noflying days with games and pranks that showcased their endless – if pointless – ingenuity. One much-prized skill was the ability to put a postage stamp, sticky side up, on top of a two-shilling piece and then flip the coin so that the stamp finished up stuck to the ceiling. Those with a good sense of balance could attempt to do a hand-stand, balance on their head, and in that position drink a pint of beer without spilling a drop. A trick with an even higher tariff required them to stand upright with a full pint on their forehead, slowly recline until they were flat on the floor and then get back to their feet, once more without spilling a drop of beer. Team games included Mess Rugby, played with a stuffed forage cap for a ball and armchairs as additional opponents to be avoided while sprinting across the Mess. There was also the ascent of ‘Mount Everest’, which involved piling chairs one on top of each other with ‘the odd bod perched in them’. The ‘mountaineer’ would then climb the heap bare-footed and clutching a plateful of green jelly. When he reached the top of the stack, he placed his bare feet one at a time firmly in the jelly, and then, holding himself upside down, left the imprints of his bare feet on the ceiling. Once the stack of chairs had been removed, newcomers were left to ponder how on earth someone had managed to walk across the ceiling 15 feet above the floor. Such mountaineering exploits did not always end well. One Canadian pilot on another squadron, Tommy Thompson, covered his bare foot with black ink, but, having successfully made his footprint on the ceiling, lost his balance, fell and broke his leg. He ‘played the role of wounded hero quite well’ in the Boston and Lincoln pubs, and never told those who bought him a drink why he was on crutches. The Boston pubs were always packed with aircrew from the surrounding RAF bases, and for those without cars, the scramble to get aboard the last buses that all left from the Market Place at 10.15 every night was, said one airman, ‘a sight which had to be seen to be believed’. Most of them just drank beer, and it was ‘rather innocuous’ because, by government decree, beer was no more than 2 per cent alcohol – less than half pre-war strength – and, says Larry Curtis, ‘you had to drink an awful lot of it before you got merry.’ There were regular sessions in the Mess, but the aircrew also ‘really needed a place away from the station where we could go to forget about the war for a while; we had a lot to be grateful for in the English pub,’ Curtis says. While the officers were enjoying a life of relative luxury at the Petwood Hotel, the NCOs found they had been allocated some rather less salubrious accommodation: a row of Nissen huts and wooden huts erected just outside the airfield’s perimeter fence at the side of the B1192 road. Roofed with corrugated iron, they were bone-chillingly cold in winter. One of the NCOs recalled, ‘One of the things we had to be careful about, living in Nissen huts in England in the winter, was that if you put your hand against the wall or the roof, it stuck there [because it froze to the metal]. I’ve seen a few hands with palms left behind.’ There was one other peril for crewmen living in the Nissen huts: the trees around them were home to a colony of woodpeckers that drove them mad and disturbed their sleep after night ops with their endless, dawn-to-dusk drilling into the trees with their beaks. Amidst the camaraderie, the dangers and the tedium of RAF life, the war ground on, and as the Christmas festivities of 1943 faded from their memories, the men of 617 Squadron began to wonder just how long the fight would last. CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_2c19f6c9-f149-5fcf-8d8f-1206cfec5ec4) Death or Glory (#ulink_2c19f6c9-f149-5fcf-8d8f-1206cfec5ec4) A raid by 617 Squadron on a V-1 site in the Pas de Calais on 22 January 1944 – the same day that the Battle of Anzio was launched in Italy – marked another decisive moment in the evolution of the squadron. Leonard Cheshire tried to mark the target from 7,000 feet, but his bomb-aimer, Keith ‘Aspro’ Astbury – a flamboyant and spectacularly foul-mouthed Australian who was one of the most cherished characters on the squadron – was unsighted by flares bursting ahead of them at the crucial moment and the markers overshot the target. Mick Martin had previously told Cheshire that he could ‘hit a target as small as a clump of seaweed by using his Lancaster as a dive bomber without using the bombsight’. According to another veteran of 617, Cheshire had rubbished the idea at the time, but Martin now set out to prove it. Disobeying his orders, instead of dropping his spot-fire markers from height, he dived down and placed them with precision from 400 feet instead. Subsequent reconnaissance photography showed substantial damage to the site, and the unusually accurate Main Force bombing seemed to justify Martin’s claims about the effectiveness of low-level marking. With the successes they were now achieving, 617 Squadron was no longer being seen as ‘the suicide squadron’. They were hitting more targets, losing fewer aircraft, and having considerably more effect than much of Main Force. While the bulk of Bomber Command continued with the policy of laying waste to whole cities, 617 was specialising in the precision bombing of individual targets, a task requiring new techniques and new equipment to produce the spectacularly accurate navigation and weapon aiming that would be required. The first opportunity for Cheshire himself to test the ultra-low-level target-marking technique in operational conditions came on 8 February 1944, when 617 Squadron was tasked with an attack on the Gnome-Rh?ne aero engine factory at Limoges in Occupied France, one of a series of ‘factory-buster’ raids the squadron made targeting crucial links in the German military production chain. Even with all his experience, Cheshire could still learn from other pilots, and according to one crewman, ‘Micky Martin was the “Head Boy” in low level. He taught Mr Cheshire how to fly low level.’ To his credit, Cheshire himself acknowledged his debt to Martin, describing him as ‘the greatest bomber pilot of the war’. That view was echoed by Martin’s crewman, Larry Curtis, who said of him, ‘Some idea of the esteem in which I hold him is that I named one of my sons after him – best pilot I ever flew with.’ However, no one, not even Mick Martin, had quite the same degree of coolness and fearlessness over the target as Cheshire. Relying on the Lancaster’s gunners to protect their aircraft from fighters, Cheshire backed himself against the flak batteries, flying his own Lancaster in at low level – as low as 50 feet – to mark the target. He also went out of his way to minimise the risk of ‘collateral damage’ – civilian casualties – on the raids 617 made into Occupied France. However, using the lumbering Lancasters almost as dive-bombers, swooping down to mark a target and executing sharp turns and steep climbs to escape, put huge stresses on their airframes and engines, and it was a tribute to the Lancaster’s strength of construction that the aircraft flown by Martin and Cheshire did not fall apart under the strain. The raid on Limoges was the first op with 617 for Bob Knights’ crew, and his bomb-aimer, John Bell, felt: a frisson of excitement and a real sense of anticipation. This was what I really wanted to be doing: attacking individual installations. It was a crew job to get us all to the right target at the right height and time, but the bomb-aimer had that final role to make the attack a success and I was certainly conscious of that sense of responsibility every time we flew an op. On our previous ops for Bomber Command there were usually hundreds of aircrew at the main briefing, but now there was only a handful – quite a change! Regardless of the numbers involved, the ritual preparation for a raid was remarkably similar across Bomber Command. The aircrews all struggled into their flying gear, the gunners wearing long underwear and woollen sweaters beneath their electrically heated flying suits, which were unbearably hot at ground level on a warm summer’s day, but vital flying at up to 20,000 feet in their exposed, bitterly cold gun turrets. However, many gunners complained that it was impossible to maintain a steady temperature in the suits. They were protected from the elements only by a flimsy bit of Perspex, but many removed it to improve visibility, and were often sitting in their turrets in a temperature of minus 20 degrees when ‘you had icicles hanging down from your oxygen mask’. One gunner recalled it being ‘minus twenty-four one night over Berlin’. In order to combat the extreme cold in that position, another gunner plastered all the exposed parts of his face and hands with lanolin, like a Channel swimmer covering himself with grease. All the crews put on their ‘Mae West’ life-jackets, with parachute harnesses going over the top of them, and carried their flying helmets or hung them around their necks by the oxygen tubes and intercom cords. They then boarded the crew bus, which lumbered round the perimeter of the airfield, dropping each crew by their regular aircraft. They all looked bulky in their Mae Wests, and the gunners, in their heated flying suits, seemed even larger. After an external inspection and a word with the ground crew, the pilot signed the Form 700 – the aircraft’s Engineering Record Book. One officer recalled the sense of isolation as he waited for take-off on an op one December night, standing around ‘warming ourselves at the ground crew’s fire, which was burning outside the little shack. It was pretty cold. Things were quiet. No sensation of being surrounded by an air armada waiting to take off. Just a small party in a corner of a big, windy field.’ Before boarding the aircraft, the crews went through their pre-flight rituals, some peeing on the tail wheel, others clutching a battered soft toy or wearing a ‘lucky’ hat, then they clambered up the ladder and through the narrow hatchway by the rear wheel, dragging their flight bags and parachute packs with them. For such a large aircraft, the interior was remarkably cramped – six men jammed into a space no bigger than the interior of a small van, with the seventh in lonely isolation in his turret at the tail – but then, the design priority had been room to house the bomb-load, not the crew. Even relatively short men had to stoop, and in their bulky kit it was a struggle to move along the narrow passageway and over the main spar of the aircraft; for a tall man like bomb-aimer John Bell it was a constant trial by ordeal, banging his head, scraping his knees and catching his clothing on protruding metal. Take-off for the attack on the Gnome-Rh?ne engine factory was at nine that cold February night, and the twelve crews held off, circling at a distance from the target, while Cheshire and Mick Martin carried out the target marking. The factory employed 2,000 French civilians, mostly women, and because of the risk to them and the damaging propaganda that would ensue if large numbers were killed in a raid, it had actually been struck off Bomber Command’s list of potential targets. Two constraints had therefore been imposed on 617 Squadron: no French civilians were to be killed and, to ensure that and to maximise the damage to the factory, all bombs had to fall within the target area. One of the Lancasters was adapted so that a cine-film could be made of the raid, in the hope of providing evidence to contradict any German propaganda claims, and to generate British propaganda if the raid proved successful. As a result of those constraints, Cheshire first made three low-level runs across the factory to give the workers inside – ‘mostly French girls’ – warning that bombs would soon be falling on it. It was a difficult, twisting approach down a narrow valley, swerving around two tall water towers and a factory chimney, but Cheshire and Martin then placed their yellow incendiaries squarely in the middle of the factory, their accuracy helped by the fact that the lights in the factory were blazing, with the blackout both there and in the town itself ‘very poor’. As the factory lights were extinguished, Cheshire called in the remainder of the squadron to bomb the burning markers. ‘I couldn’t really see the target itself most of the time,’ Johnny Johnson said. ‘You bombed the different coloured flares that Cheshire had dropped. So he would go in, drop the flare on the target, then radio to instruct us to bomb a certain coloured flare.’ The fires of the flickering markers lit up the surrounding factory buildings and cast an eerie glow across the site. The new low-level marking technique proved devastatingly effective. All but one bomb landed inside the factory compound, and so tight was the bombing that the blast from one 12,000-pounder almost extinguished the fires started by Cheshire’s incendiaries. The factory was virtually wiped off the map. ‘We flattened the target but saved the civilians,’ Johnson says. ‘That gave us a real sense of accomplishment. Cheshire held us back until he thought they were all clear, and later he got a letter thanking him for ensuring their safety!’ In fact Johnson may be remembering a subsequent raid on a factory in Angoul?me on 20 March 1944, after which they received a message from the mayor, thanking them for not killing any French people, though the mayor added that he couldn’t understand ‘why the British were firing at the street when the French were coming out and cheering us on’. But Mac Hamilton recalled, ‘As always in 617, once you dropped your bomb, you just didn’t beetle off home, you went round again and shot up flak towers and distracted the gunners while the other aircraft were coming in to bomb.’ The morning after the Limoges raid, the 617 aircrews were told the attack had been a success, and most of them realised at once that it was a defining moment. A still from the cine-film of the raid, showing Cheshire’s incendiaries landing on the factory roof, was released to the world’s press, adding fresh lustre to the growing legend of the Dambusters. ‘We sensed that this type of target marking heralded a new phase of the war for us,’ John Bell says. ‘It was good to be away from the mass bombing.’ He had had plenty of experience of area bombing. * * * Even today, Bell remains tall and sharp-featured, with a high forehead and a keen, penetrating gaze, and, now entering his nineties, he still holds himself ramrod-straight. He was only sixteen years old when war was declared on 3 September 1939. During the summer he had heard his father and friends talking about the prospect of war but, Bell says, ‘it all seemed unreal. We thought that diplomats would talk our way out of the war. It couldn’t really happen, could it?’ His father had served in Egypt during the Great War but never spoke about it and, like most people then, didn’t expect the war to last long. He thought that all the men rushing to join up would soon be back looking for jobs, so he told his son he’d be better off starting a career before the competition got too intense. Bell began training as an accountant but, not wanting to be left out of the war effort, he also joined the Home Guard, ‘so I was doing a bit of parading around with a rifle and no bullets,’ he says with a smile. He was also trained in sabotage in case the feared German invasion took place. Bell was living in Surrey and working in London, and once the ‘phoney war’ had ended with the onset of the Blitz, he had a close-up view of the impact of the war. One night as he was walking home, some bombs fell close by and he ended up sheltering under a park bench. ‘The air-raid sirens were howling, the anti-aircraft guns were firing and shrapnel from the shells was falling all around me,’ he says. ‘I think that was more dangerous than the German bombs – chunks of hot metal fizzing down around you. It was certainly scary, but there was nothing you could do about it – it was happening everywhere.’ However, seeing its effects so close at hand made him determined to play his full part in the war. ‘I’d seen the Army come back from Dunkirk in tatters,’ he says, ‘watched the Battle of Britain raging over my head, and seen the results of the bombing: the destruction, flattened buildings and smoking ruins. It made me want to be part of the fight, to hit back at the Germans who were attacking our country.’ Like all recruits to the RAF, Bell had hopes of being a pilot but they were soon dashed. At six feet four inches tall, he was ‘deemed to be too long in the leg’ to get out of a cockpit in a hurry and began training as an observer and navigator in South Africa. He knew nothing of the country other than what he had read in magazines, and ‘imagined jungles and wild animals everywhere’, he says smiling. ‘We were all wide-eyed boys going out there, very naive!’ He returned to England as a fully trained observer, but was then informed that he would be a bomb-aimer instead. Being so tall always made it awkward to get into his bomb-aimer’s position, but ‘twenty years old and skinny, I could manage to get through a lot of difficult places’. Even when he’d got himself into position, it remained an uncomfortable experience for Bell, with no room to stand upright in the compartment. Fortunately, the bomb-aimer was the only member of the crew who could see directly beneath the aircraft through the bulbous Perspex ‘goldfish bowl’ in the nose, so he had a grandstand view of the bombs going down and the flak coming up. After completing his training, he went to an Operational Training Unit where he ‘crewed up’. Pilots, navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers and gunners were all assembled in a hangar and then told to form into crews. Bell was talking to a Canadian navigator, Harry Rhude, when a much older man, a rear gunner, joined them and said he’d found a pilot. ‘I know he’s had a crash during his training,’ he said, ‘so I think he’ll be a bloody sight more careful in future!’ The rear gunner introduced them to their pilot, Bob Knights, with the words ‘I’ve found you a navigator and a bomb-aimer.’ ‘Oh good,’ Knights said. ‘All we need now is a wireless operator,’ and promptly went off to look for one. ‘It seemed pretty haphazard,’ Bell says, ‘but I don’t think there was any other way to do it. My only thought was: You are choosing the people you’ll spend the next few years with, live with, possibly die with. So who would you trust most?’ Having crewed-up, they were sent to a Heavy Conversion Unit where they flew a Lancaster for the first time. Bell liked everything about the aircraft except the long trek back to the Elsan chemical toilet at the rear of the aircraft. ‘It was a good aircraft, very robust, and never really gave us any trouble.’ The Elsan was obviously not an option for the pilots, who had to make alternative arrangements. The Australian pilot Bruce Buckham’s crew ‘very kindly kept the tops of the smoke floats we were tossing out’, so if his bladder was bursting, he’d use one of those, then open the chute they used for dropping Window, and the suction was so strong that it would go straight down the chute. ‘Unfortunately the second time I used it,’ Buckham recalled, ‘I spilled some and it went all over the bomb-aimer down below. He was not pleased. That’s where the expression comes from – though Guy Gibson introduced it – “pissed on from a great height”!’ John Bell’s crew were posted in June 1943, joining the newly formed 619 Squadron. As they arrived at their base at Woodhall Spa, Knights murmured, ‘I wonder how long we’re going to last here.’ ‘I remember that to this day,’ Bell says. It was an off-the-cuff remark, but we knew the losses that were being suffered by Bomber Command, though I was quite surprised to hear Bob referring to it. As a rule we never discussed losses, and every time we heard of them, it was always a number of aircraft, not people. I’d hear on the radio ‘Bomber Command lost thirty aircraft last night,’ but I never translated that into numbers of people at the time. Years later I did think about it, knowing that thirty aircraft meant over two hundred people had been killed. You’d see empty spaces at breakfast or beds being cleared away, but you didn’t let it affect you. We all had the same attitude: It won’t happen to me. Of course, later on, I realised that there were around fifty-five thousand men who had said the same thing, and it did happen to them. Their aircraft’s designation letter was T, and Knights, who had recently seen the Disney film Bambi, released in 1942, christened his aircraft ‘Thumper’ and had Bambi’s rabbit friend painted on the nose. Their first op in T-Thumper on 24 July 1943 would have been memorable to them for that reason alone, but it also happened to be the launch of Operation Gomorrah – a series of mass bomber raids on Hamburg by Bomber Command and the USAAF that in the course of eight days and seven nights effectively destroyed Germany’s second city. It was also the first time that Window was dropped to give false signals to German radar, which was ‘a bit of luck for me’, Knights later said, ‘because the bombing was more or less unopposed.’ John Bell’s crew before a raid on Frankfurt They’d flown out over the featureless darkness of the North Sea and the blacked-out landscape of Germany. The first lights John Bell saw in the far distance were the beams of searchlights piercing the night sky over Hamburg, the flashes of exploding flak shells and the glow of the drifting smoke from the shell-bursts as it was caught and illuminated in the searchlight beams. As they flew closer, he saw the first fires and burning buildings on the ground from the bombing force ahead of them, but also the mass of flak-bursts through which they would also have to pass: Stuck in my Perspex bubble in the nose, surrounded by nothing other than flimsy plastic that offered no protection at all, I had the best view of the flak. It looked pretty threatening, and someone would always say: ‘Looks like the natives are a bit unfriendly tonight!’ The flak barrage was in full swing when we arrived and we had to fly into that – me first! It was lighting up the residual smoke, so it looked both alarming and spectacular – it may have been dangerous but you just have to get on with the job. I was apprehensive, but I don’t remember any real fear. I just thought, How are we going to get through that? Then I just concentrated on the bombing run and ignored everything around me. He had a clear view of the bombing’s impact on the city below them. ‘I’d seen the impact of bombing close up in London, but looking down on this mass of burning buildings was my first sight of what Bomber Command could do, and it was an awesome – and awful – sight. I didn’t think about the people on the ground at that time – I did later – but back then, it was all just part of the war. When we came out the other side, I just heaved a sigh of relief and told the pilot to climb higher and get out.’ At the end of the week-long Operation Gomorrah, Hamburg had been almost completely destroyed. The hot, dry weather and the mainly wooden construction of the houses fuelled the firestorm ignited by thousands of tons of incendiaries and high-explosive bombs. Generating temperatures of 800° C and wind-speeds of 150 miles an hour, it created a ferocious vortex of fire that rose over 1,000 feet into the air and swept across the city, consuming everything in its path. The tarmac of the streets burst into flame, and spilled fuel oil ignited as it spread across the surface of the canals and harbour, making it seem as if even the water was on fire. Even air-raid shelters and deep cellars offered no protection; people sheltering in them were suffocated as the firestorm consumed the oxygen. Operation Gomorrah killed over 40,000 people and left a million more homeless. Of all the Main Force ops that Bell flew, he retains the strongest memories of that first raid on Hamburg, though he also vividly recalls Berlin, because it was so heavily defended and they attacked it so often. The impact of one of those mass raids on Berlin in November 1943 was vividly described by a Swedish businessman who found himself trapped in the city as the bombs fell. His account gives a powerful insight into the horrific experiences of German civilians pinned under Bomber Command’s relentless onslaught: ‘The fire brigades and ARP personnel are powerless to cope with the situation. Day has been turned to night by the billowing clouds of evil-smelling smoke which fill the streets. The sky is blotted out.’ The Ministries of Propaganda and Munitions were badly damaged, the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse was wrecked, as was the gigantic Air Ministry building in Leipzigerstrasse – ‘G?ring’s pride and joy’. The Wilhelmstrasse and Unter den Linden districts were burning so ferociously that ‘firemen have given up the hopeless struggle. They have cordoned off whole blocks of buildings and simply left them to burn themselves out. Armed guards equipped with gas masks against the suffocating smoke are stationed at the cordons.’ The once beautiful, tree-lined Unter den Linden was ‘a shambles’, with almost every building on fire. ‘There was a sound of hissing as light rain fell on the flames.’ The University State Library and the Bristol Hotel – one of Berlin’s finest – were destroyed. The Adlon Hotel, requisitioned for the homeless, was still standing, but all its windows had been blown out. The Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrechtstrasse and the headquarters of the Berlin police were both badly damaged. There was an SS cordon round the workers’ quarters north of the Alexanderplatz to prevent workers leaving the factories and escaping to the country, and armed guards also surrounded Berlin’s zoo in the Tiergarten, while troops armed with rifles and machine guns hunted the leopards, elephants, bears, tigers and lions which had escaped after the zoo was hit by bombs. ‘Berliners, fatalistic, now believe that the RAF will return every night until Berlin is in ruins.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/john-nichol/return-of-the-dambusters-what-617-squadron-did-next/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.