Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop
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to have met a Canadian or an Australian, yet when crewing up they seemed drawn to each other, confirming the wisdom of the process. Group Captain Hamish Mahaddie, who was tasked with finding talent for the Pathfinder Force, which was formed to lead the main bomber force to the target, believed that ‘the best crews were a mixture’.20
The system was not perfect. At Bruntingthorpe OTU Cyril March teamed up with an Australian skipper, navigator and wireless operator. The rest of the crew were English. ‘We did our job and had one or two good thrashes but we were never all together and to my mind we didn’t gel.’ Their first training trip was a fighter affiliation exercise in which the pilot was expected to throw the Wellington around the sky to shake off the ‘attacker’. After a row with the navigator, he appeared to lose control and ordered the crew to crash positions. The bomber landed but overshot the runway coming to a halt in the grass. The next trip took place in clear sunshine but the captain still managed to lose his way. March ‘felt so bloody helpless. I was doing my job, telling them when we were passing over airfields and such. I couldn’t help thinking [what] if this were Germany on a black night with duff winds etcetera – Christ!’ Word of the crew’s failings reached the station authorities. It was split up and its members redistributed. This time March was lucky. The first of his new comrades was Ken Ford, a Londoner, who with the rest of the crew, became his lifelong friends.
Ken took me to meet my new skipper, a tousle-haired fair Aussie with steady blue eyes and a friendly grin. ‘I’m Neville Emery,’ he said, ‘Bug to my mates.’ I had noticed he had been eyeing me up and down and asked him why. ‘Oh nothing mate,’ he said laughing. ‘Kenny was telling me that you were an old married man.’ I was just twenty-one. I met Des Gee the Aussie wireless operator, again blond and blue-eyed; then Ray Brooker, a dark Englishman from Cambridge, the bomb-aimer with a ready smile. Then I met Terry Sayles, a Yorkshireman from Doncaster, the navigator. I told him my name was Cyril. ‘Hi Cy,’ he said and that was my name thenceforth. Des got me a bed in their Nissen hut and helped me move my gear in. That night they weren’t flying and they said, ‘Coming down the village for a jar?’ ‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Where’s your bike, Cy?’ Terry asked. ‘Bike!’ I replied, ‘I haven’t got one.’ He got one, I don’t know where and I didn’t ask. Off we went in formation. I knew I was in a crew at long last.
They came back in high spirits, yelling ‘Bring out your dead’ as they wobbled on their bikes over rickety planks bridging the Leicestershire ditches. Cyril was happy and content. ‘I knew then that with these lads we would survive, no doubt about it.’
This, in the end, was what the airmen were searching for as they milled around the hangars looking for kindred spirits. An efficient air, a friendly manner were all very well. But in the end, the most attractive quality anyone could possess was to seem lucky.
Inevitably, when the mating ritual finished, a gaggle of wallflowers remained. ‘At the end of the day there were some odd bods left around who … had no choice but to take the leftovers,’ said Tom Wingham, who flew with 102 Squadron. ‘[You] had a feeling that they weren’t going to make it and inevitably they didn’t. They didn’t have that same sort of “gel”. I suppose you could say they had the smell of death about them and it was not funny.’21
The men that would lead them through the final stage of training and into the daunting world of ‘ops’ seemed old, even though many were only in their mid-twenties. These were the veterans, ‘tour-expired’ survivors of thirty operations or more. ‘It was our first close contact with people who had completed operations, surviving against unlikely odds,’ wrote Dennis Field. ‘Gongs were common, almost part of the dress, and worn without flamboyance. Although we were keen to hear and learn all we could, in off-duty hours they stayed detached and there was little line-shooting in our presence. We realized that within a few months we should all meet some ultimate experience.’
Instructing posts were the reward for survival. Not that such jobs were free of risk. Half of the flying done at OTUs was at night. The darkness, and the sometimes clapped-out machines which were used for training meant that deadly accidents were routine. After agreeing to fly with one captain, Dennis Steiner was approached by two other pilots whom he had to turn down. Subsequently, one flew into the ground for no discoverable reason, killing himself and all his crew. The other developed engine trouble during a flight and ordered the crew to bale out. ‘Their luck ran out soon after when at night a practice bomb from another aircraft fell on them and they crashed,’ he wrote. ‘None of the crew survived. The line between surviving or not was becoming very thin.’
It seemed to Ken Newman that at least some of the accidents were due to criminal recklessness rather than the demands of war. In February 1944 he went to a Heavy Conversion Unit for a month’s training. This was where crews familiarized themselves with the types that they would be flying on operations. Newman was learning his way around the Halifax. ‘The aircraft were old, poorly maintained and in the most part barely airworthy. But it was constantly drilled into us that complaints would not be entertained and if we refused to fly because we thought a Halifax was not airworthy, or for a reason that the staff decided was trivial, we would be treated as LMF [Lacking in Moral Fibre, the RAF bureaucratic euphemism for the accusation of cowardice].’ This was very much the view of the chief flying instructor who Newman held responsible for the death of one of his best friends and all his crew.
He had met Alec, ‘a tall, likeable chap’ while training in South Africa and caught up with him at RAF Lindholme where the HCU was based. One night he was detailed for a high-level cross-country flight, even though the weather forecast had warned of heavy cloud and severe icing conditions. To reduce the risk, it was essential to fly at maximum altitude. ‘Alec took off and after a while found that his aircraft would not climb above 15,000 feet. Consequently he returned to RAF Lindholme. Wing Commander X heard about this and ordered Alec to continue the exercise, refusing to believe that the aircraft could not reach a safe height and accused him of being LMF. Intimidated, Alec and his crew went off. The following day we heard that his aircraft had crashed into a Scottish mountain and all were dead.’ The instructor was to die in an accident a few months later.22
The road to the operational squadrons was long and expensive. It cost on average £10,000 to train each crew member, the equivalent, according to one indicator, of about £850,000 in today’s money. This was a lot to pay to get each Bomber Boy into battle. It did not, however, mean that when they got there, their lives would be worth very much.
Bomber Command lost 4,823 men and 2,331 aircraft on operations in the first two years of the war. There was very little to show for it. In that time it dropped only 35,194 tons of bombs. That was two thousand tons less than it dropped in the single month of May, 1944. Despite the great effort, the resulting destruction was often small and the casualties inflicted were minimal. A typical night’s work was that of 29/30 August 1941. More than 140 aircraft were sent to attack railways and harbours in Frankfurt. They reached their target successfully and began bombing. They managed to do some damage to a gasworks, a barrel warehouse and a few houses and to kill eight people. In the course of the operation one Hampden was lost without trace. Another crashed in France killing all on board. A Halifax crew baled out over England after running out of fuel but two men died in the process, one after his parachute got caught in the tailplane. A Whitley was forced to ditch off the Essex coast. All in all, the operation resulted in the loss of sixteen lives – two for every German killed – and seven aircraft. Despite the sacrifice, the attack barely bothered the Frankfurt authorities who nonchalantly recorded the raid as ‘light and scattered bombing’.
The perils of each trip mounted as the German fighter and flak defences adapted and improved. In March 1941, Doug Mourton arrived at 102 Squadron to fly as a wireless operator on Whitleys. One night his crew were detailed to attack Hamburg. Initially, it seemed ‘a comparatively easy trip’. They took off in bright moonlight and as the target approached Mourton could see another Whitley flying a parallel course. ‘Suddenly it exploded. What had been an aircraft