Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  ‘You can’t escape the smell, Michael, the smell of that smoke,’ says George. But the stench of cordite was the least of his worries. ‘We ended up with a huge hole in the starboard motor nacelle, one engine gone, a shredded starboard tail fin and one rudder useless.’ After dropping their bombs and turning for home as best they could, Ted found it impossible to keep with the formation and began to lose height. ‘All right, Burn, do what you can’ was the less than encouraging reply over the wireless from their flight commander.

  Believing they had no chance to make it back over the English Channel, Ted began to look for somewhere to put the Mitchell down, when Dave called out, ‘There’s a landing strip down there, Ted.’ It was one of the rather small-looking forward strips recently carved out of the French countryside, ‘a very home-made looking thing’, says George, ‘a Typhoon strip, in fact’. Fine for a single-engine Typhoon, but for a twin-motor, battle-damaged medium bomber such as their B-25 Mitchell, it looked awfully short. It would have to do.

  Then, in stark contrast to the gravity of the situation, George was surprised to hear the sound of laughter from his pilot and navigator over the intercom. ‘The Belgian wing commander in charge of this place was standing up in a jeep, waving frantically, racing down the runway to stop us coming and tearing up his strip!’ Needless to say, he was ignored.

  The wheels touched and the aircraft sped down the runway. Its damaged brakes could do little to stop it. Reaching the end, it kept on going, hurtling through a fence and coming to rest in a wheat field. ‘Ted did a great job,’ says George. ‘A French farmer was soon on the scene and was as angry as hell. None of us spoke much French but we all decided he was making certain aspersions concerning our parentage.’

  It was a surprisingly light-hearted ending to a near-catastrophe, and after a couple of days of hitching a ride back to England, George and his crew were back at Dunsfold and, twenty-four hours later, straight back on the battle order. On their next trip, number four, there would be nothing to laugh about.

  With their original aircraft written off, lying somewhere in a Normandy field, George’s crew were given another B-25, this time a J-model variant of the famous bomber in which the top gun turret had been replaced with twin half-inch machine guns in the tail. It was not a pleasant place to be. ‘You had to crawl into this tiny cramped Perspex blister and sit on a sort of bicycle seat which you drew up behind you,’ he says. ‘The only way to get out was to drop the seat down and crawl out backwards. Besides, your guns were virtually useless.’ Offering barely a 45-degree field of fire both vertically and horizontally, these rearward firing guns were, says George, ‘absolutely ridiculous. The only way you could hit anything was if it happened to be attacking from directly behind and dead level.’ German fighters were rarely so obliging.

  On Wednesday 9 August 1944, the target was an ammunition dump located in Lyons-la-Forêt, south-east of Rouen, towards which the B-25s of 180 Squadron set off just before half past ten in the morning. It was a trip lasting two and a half hours, and every minute of it would remain vividly etched in George’s memory.

  ‘We were hit with some very intense flak before we’d even reached the target,’ he says. From his coffin-like position inside the tapering confines of the rear fuselage, George rode the ghastly, heaving explosions of an intense flak barrage, when Dave, his navigator / bomb aimer, called out suddenly over the intercom, ‘I’ve been hit!’

  Then, the voice of Ted, his skipper, ‘George, will you come forward and tend to Dave?’

  Dave, he knew, was in the nose – right at the other end of the aircraft – requiring a journey over the bomb bay to the main spar, then through a small tunnel that ran under the pilot’s seat. Taking his parachute – there being no room to actually wear it – George began extracting himself from the tail and squeezing through the equally narrow space between the Mitchell’s bomb bay and the top of the fuselage.

  Looking down, he noticed with alarm that the aircraft’s bomb doors were wide open. ‘We hadn’t begun the bomb run yet, so I knew the hydraulics which powered the bomb doors must have gone.’ Reaching an open area between the cockpit and main wing spar, George then pulled himself through the small accessway to the damaged nose to reach his wounded man. ‘I got to Dave and looked around – tangled wires, broken Perspex, jagged aluminium. I could also see there was a hell of a mess on his left leg above the knee, and he was losing blood. I said to him, “Dave, the only way I can get you out properly is if I back into the tunnel and draw you out by your shoulders.”’ Looping his arms under the man’s shoulders, George hauled the wounded man to the tunnel’s entrance where Dave gave out a yell, ‘My foot’s caught!’ Crawling back over Dave’s body, George freed his foot from a piece of damaged cable, then crawled back over him once more, finally dragging him into the small space in front of the main spar, where George reached straight away for the first-aid kit.

  ‘The first thing I noticed was that the tourniquet strap wasn’t there,’ he says. ‘I ripped his strides, opened the sterilised shell packs and packed them onto his wound – he was starting to lose a hell of a lot of blood – then used his intercom cord for a tourniquet and gave him a shot of morphine.’

  Just as he’d settled Dave onto a stretcher, the skipper called up again, ‘George, can you help me for a minute?’ Ted also had not been unscathed by the flak, a shrapnel fragment having struck his buttock, and he was bleeding. Crawling into the cockpit beside him, George decided he would try to hold the aircraft straight and level while the skipper attempted to slip a shell pack dressing under his seat, keeping it in place with his own weight.

  With two wounded crew members and an aircraft unable to maintain formation, the mission was now well and truly abandoned. As they approached the French coast, Ted announced he was about to jettison the bombs. Then came an enormous thump underneath the tail, and the voice of Jim, the second air gunner, ‘Shit, that was close!’ They all felt it, and that it was indeed close, but the Mitchell, always a sturdy aircraft, kept flying. Ted released the bombs, then asked George to go aft and check they had all dropped. ‘Sure enough, there was one hung up,’ he says. It was not their lucky day. Grabbing an axe, and with somewhat unimaginable nerve, he belted away at the recalcitrant 500-pounder until it finally fell away. And still the drama was not yet over.

  Calling up Dunsfold, the aircrew were immediately diverted to their sister station at Hartford Bridge in Hampshire, near the south coast of England, home to their fellow 2TAF squadron, No. 226. Here, better medical facilities awaited the wounded men. But first they had to get down.

  On approach, Ted hit the lever to lower the undercarriage. ‘The starboard wheel came down only slightly out of the nacelle,’ says George, ‘the port wheel didn’t move, and we had no idea about the nose wheel at all.’

  ‘See if you can wind them down manually,’ said the pilot. Making their way to the emergency handle at the back of the bomb bay, George and Jim, the two gunners, began the agonisingly slow job of winding the wheels down by hand. At this point he brings to mind the man so inured to troubles, all that is left for him is to laugh. ‘We broke the bloody thing!’ he says with a desperate chuckle. ‘I always think of that saying about fear giving you greater strength. The ratchet mechanism just came to pieces.’ The wheels had barely moved.

  Now it was up to Ted to steer the damaged aircraft towards the ground for a belly-landing. The crew took up their positions: Jim in the co-pilot’s seat to assist Ted if need be, George on the floor, his feet pressed against the main spar, back against the bomb bay, cradling the wounded Dave between his legs, with his arms held tightly around him to shield him as best he could from the impact of the crash.

  Ted lined up the Mitchell with the grass strip along the right-hand side of the tarmac, and touched it down as gently as he could, but then, as George says, ‘The old dear appeared to have a mind of her own and suddenly swung to port.’ With one wheel just slightly lowered, the aircraft drunkenly lurched to the left, careering a
cross the runway, crashing through the complicated array of fog-dispersing troughs and pipes known as ‘Fido’, eventually coming to a stop in a massive cloud of dust, amazingly, still in one piece. George’s first thoughts were for his friends. ‘The right wheel being slightly down meant we could access the forward hatch,’ he says, allowing the medicos to extract Dave quickly and put him into a waiting ambulance.

  Then came a slightly surreal moment when a voice from ‘somewhere above’ enquired nonchalantly, ‘Can I be of some use down there or will I just be a bloody nuisance?’ Looking up through a top hatch, George was greeted by the face of Wing Commander Jock Campbell, the commanding officer (CO) of 226 Squadron, standing on the wing and peering calmly down into the chaos. ‘Wonderful bloke,’ says George, and describes how the senior officer personally oversaw the care of the wounded navigator, Dave, noticing also the limping pilot, Ted, and insisting he too be taken to nearby Aldershot Hospital. ‘Ted was patched up pretty quickly,’ says George, ‘but Dave lost his leg.’

  I give out an audible, exhausted sigh.

  Wing Commander Campbell, George mentions with sadness, was soon after shot down and killed.

  Dave, however, survived, even thrived, progressing – artificial leg and all – to a long desk career with the RAF and later, NATO. On retirement, he and his wife emigrated to Australia, where he and George renewed their friendship for a decade or so, until Dave passed away. ‘It was wonderful having him close by for those years,’ he says, handing me a perfectly typed letter, which he seems keen for me to read. It is dated 9 August 1994 – fifty years to the day from that most dramatic trip number four. In it Dave apologises to a secretary of the Odd Bods Association for his inability to attend a function at which George was to be guest speaker, and also gives a brief description of the crash. ‘Had it not been for George’s initiative and actions, I would not have been around to even consider attending any Odd Bods function; I would not be functioning at all!’

  I suggest to George that he most likely saved Dave’s life.

  ‘Yes, but he also saved mine,’ he says, curiously. Surely there cannot be yet another twist to this tale?

  From its place of final rest on the far side of the runway at Hartford Bridge, George’s heavily damaged Mitchell was brought over to a hangar and parked just outside. Jacking it up and managing to lower the undercarriage, the chief flight mechanic carried out an inspection. George and Jim, meanwhile, were waiting in the mess. Just as they were no doubt reflecting on their extraordinary luck at still being alive, the ground crew chief walked in.

  ‘Were either of you two fellas in the tail today?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim, nodding to his companion. ‘George was up there until Dave got hurt.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said the chiefie knowingly. ‘Just come and have a look at this,’ and led them out to take a look at what remained of their aircraft.

  ‘Seriously, Michael,’ George tells me, ‘the tail looked like a bloody colander. There were holes everywhere.’ The single burst of flak the aircraft took as it crossed the French coast peppered the tail section with shrapnel, but George had already vacated it to attend to Dave. ‘I crawled back up inside the plane and the chiefie poked this steel rod he was holding through the holes. Every time he hit me.’ But for Dave’s cry for help from one end of the aircraft, George would have almost certainly been killed at the other.

  George and his crew – with a replacement navigator – completed an extraordinarily intense tour of forty-four operations, finishing on 3 December 1944, with a ninety-minute trip to Venlo, in Holland, close to the German border. The entries in his log continue to paint small but vivid portraits of air combat: ‘December 3. Ops 44 – Bombing. Road and rail bridge at Venlo. Heavy flak. A/c hit (no holes).’ His target list – Clermont-Ferrand, Abbeville, Roermond, Oldenzaal, Mönchengladbach – follows the gradual, painstaking progress of the Allied advance out of Normandy and France, through Holland, until the war was eventually taken into Germany itself.

  One addendum to an entry draws my attention. ‘September 8. Ops 13. Bombing. Enemy gun positions near Boulogne. Heavy flak.’ Then, in blue ink, George has added in small, neat writing, ‘B-Beer 98 Sqdn blew-up on landing.’ His shoulders sink slightly as I draw his attention to it.

  ‘We’d just come in from that trip and had turned off the runway when B-Beer landed,’ he begins. ‘It was a Canadian crew, 98 Squadron. Loveridge – that was the name of the skipper. The wireless / air gunner was a chap named George Churchard, I knew him quite well.’ He pauses here for a moment, picturing the faces of the men whose names I suspect he has not uttered in a long time. ‘You know they always told us, “Never, ever bring a bomb back.” Well, we don’t know what happened – perhaps they hadn’t checked, or couldn’t shake it off – but they had decided to take the risk and land with it.’

  As the Canadian Mitchell hit the runway at Dunsfold, the hung-up 500-pound bomb shook free, fell through the bomb bay doors, skidded along under the aircraft for a moment and detonated. ‘All of them were killed except George Churchard,’ George says. ‘He hung on till later that evening with no arms and no legs. Then he died, thank God.’

  He remembers also a large ground-staff sergeant they simply called ‘Tubby’ (‘a huge man’, George says), ‘he was standing by the control tower, watching the aircraft come in and a small piece of shrapnel from the explosion struck him in the chest and killed him. Just like that. Just as he was standing there.’ He shakes his head, still somewhat disbelieving. ‘We were taxiing at the time and were facing it front on as it went up,’ he says. ‘The skipper saw it all. It really shook him up.’

  Having completed their fifty trips, George’s crew were considered ‘tour expired’, and one day in December were summoned into the wing commander’s office, to be quietly reclassified as ‘spares’. Then, turning to George, he said, ‘Smith, to be quite honest, I think you’ve had enough.’ Despite being one trip shy of his fifty, George had flown his last operation.

  In a twist of truly terrible irony, George’s pilot, Ted Burn, having survived the flak and crash landings, not to mention bringing back his crew after each trip of his long and dangerous tour, was nearly killed soon after – asleep on his bunk bed. George tells the peculiar story of an airman in an adjacent room inadvertently firing his pistol through the thin plywood wall when using the butt of the service revolver to – of all things – hammer a nail into the wall to pin up a picture of his wife! The wayward bullet struck Ted in the side of the head, but he survived, albeit with lasting consequences.

  After cooling his heels far longer than he’d anticipated, George set sail for home in April 1945 and heard the news of Germany’s surrender while still on board. His parents even lashed out on hiring a taxi to meet him as he came down the plank and set foot once more on home soil.

  He went back to an office job, started to play football and met the love of his life, but his return to civilian life was not an easy one. There were nightmares, there were anxieties and then, well, ‘the sheer bloody absurdity’, after what he’d seen and been through, of sitting in an office doing paperwork.

  ‘I had a recurring dream of bailing out of an aircraft and my chute not opening and just tumbling, tumbling,’ he says. ‘My brother and I slept in a sleep-out at home out the back. Eventually, he asked for a room of his own so he didn’t have to sleep with that “raving bloody lunatic out the back”.’

  George admits that his wife and children also suffered the consequences of his war. ‘I don’t believe I was as bad as some of the fellows that I knew, but I’ve had psychiatric treatment from Vet Affairs, which has helped.’ The two factors which, in his estimation, helped him recover were the strong bond with his crew, most of whom he remained in contact with, and the strength and understanding of his partner. ‘She’d lost a brother in the air force in Malta and so understood what it was I was going through,’ he says.

  Around Anzac Day in 1946, George was listening to the plans of the former service
men in his office, and how they intended to spend it with their mates from their old unit to reminisce. ‘There were a couple of other blokes who, like me, had been in RAF units in Europe. We just looked at each other and thought, Where do we fit into all this?’ And so the ‘Odd Bods’ was born, and for seventy years or so, has provided thousands of men like George with a focal point of friendship, belonging and remembering.

  As a man with a natural gift for speaking, George has fre­quently done so to schoolchildren, telling them not just about his own experiences, but impressing on them firsthand the awful nature of war, and the importance of tolerance and understanding, which starts, he says, ‘with your family, with your community, with your nation’.

  He seems just as full of vitality at the end of our afternoon as he had been at the start. I, by contrast, am exhausted. I ask him if, knowing the odds, he thought he would survive his tour.

  He takes a long pause before answering. ‘You know, Michael, I couldn’t afford to think that I wasn’t going to get through, otherwise I couldn’t have done the job. But after a trip, when we seemed to be in flak absolutely all the time, you’d look back and think, ‘Good God, have we just come through that?’ I remember one occasion – one of the attacks at Venlo, I think – when I looked ahead at what was coming, turned off my intercom and let out one enormous long scream, then switched it on again and just carried on. When we got down, Jim, the other air gunner, quietly said to me, “I’ve only ever heard you do that once. You obviously haven’t been hearing me.”’

  George Smith’s logbook, illustrating the first part of his eventful tour with the Tactical Air Force in France. His fourth Op to bomb an ammunition dump near Rouen on 9 August was nearly his last. (Picture courtesy of George Smith)

  Wireless/air gunner George Smith. He would complete a dramatic tour with 180 Squadron in B-25 Mitchell bombers in late 1944. (Picture courtesy of George Smith)