The word came on October 28, and thirty-six Lancasters of 617 and 9 Squadrons flew north to a bleak field near Lossiemouth. At midnight a Mosquito over Tromso radioed that the wind was veering to the east, and in drizzling rain, at the deathly hour of I a.m., the overburdened Lancasters took off.
They flew low as usual, in sight of the caps on the dark water; hours later crossed the Norwegian coast and turned inland towards Sweden to keep the mountains between them and the Tromso radar. They wheeled left in a long climb, topped the ridges and saw Tromso Fiord and the ship… and saw in the same moment, moving in from the sea, towering drifts of cloud. The wind had changed.
It was a race again, like those sickening moments over Alten Fiord, but this time the white screens were higher and thicker. At 230 m.p.h. the bombers charged towards the ship and the cloud. A minute from release point they still saw the ship, but with thirty seconds to go the cloud slid between them.
They couldn’t dive under it to bomb; lower down the “tallboys” would not have penetrated the armoured decks. Daniels tried to keep his bomb sight on the spot where he last saw the ship. Flak was bursting through the cloud among them now. Daniels called “Bomb gone!” and Tait dived into the cloud to try and see where it fell. Fawke, Iveson, Knights and one or two more bombed on vague glimpses and dived too. Others swung away to try another run. Through gaps in the cloud at about 13,000 feet Tait saw flashes as bombs exploded in the water round the ship. One or two others said they thought they saw a direct hit or near miss.
Carey’s Lancaster had been hit by flak on the first run; the starboard outer engine stopped and petrol streamed out of a riven tank, luckily without catching fire. He turned back on three engines for another run and the cloud foiled him. He tried again and again, ploughing steadfastly through the flak till, on the sixth run, an almost desperate bomb aimer let his “tallboy” go with faint hope.
Tait had ordered everyone to dive to 1,000 feet to pick up speed and steer for home. As Carey screamed down he passed over a small island: a single gun on it pumped a shell into another engine, which died instantly; petrol was streaming out of another burst tank (miraculously no fire again), and then the hydraulics burst and the bomb doors and undercarriage flopped down. The two good engines on full power just held her in the air against the drag; the engineer thumbed his gauges, scribbed a few calculations and said, “Sorry, Skip. Not enough gas to get home.”
From the rear turret came a protesting, grimly flippant voice: “This can’t happen to me.” Witherick was flying with Carey this time. He had a habit of switching crews.
“Can’t it?” said Carey. “You watch!”
He turned the winged plane towards the land and, staggering through the air a few hundred feet up, they threaded through a mountain pass and slowly crossed the barren country. Half an hour later the navigator said they were over Sweden. The two engines were dangerously hot and Carey crash-landed in a bog near Porjus. The Lancaster tilted frighteningly on her nose, poised a moment and settled back, and they climbed out.
The rest of the squadron landed at Lossiemouth and heard that a recce plane radioed that the Tirpitz was untouched. They flew down to Woodhall, where Tait found a message from Cochrane : “Congratulations on your splendid flight and perseverance. The luck won’t always favour the Tirpitz. One day you’ll get her.”
CHAPTER XVIII THE NAKED BATTLESHIP
ANEW complication jolted Cochrane. Intelligence reported that twenty to thirty German fighters had moved in to Bardufoss airfield, thirty miles from Tromso. No doubting why! Two strong attacks had been made on the Tirpitz’s the Germans would give the next one a lethal reception. Cochrane found himself in the old position of the commander forced to stay at his desk and decide whether to send his men into an ambush. For all his coldness there was a personal factor this time that he tried to eliminate. 617 never knew (and would never have guessed) that they were the apple of his eye; he had a respect for them amounting to affection.
But it was an operational war. That was the clinching factor. He decided they would have to go if the cloud let them.
Next day the weather was improving. Tait was playing football with his crews on the airfield, surrounded by the circle of silent cloaked Lancasters, when he was summoned to the operations room, and there, still in striped jersey and studded boots, he got his orders. In a few hours they were flying up to Northern Scotland.
Some time after midnight the weather Mosquito, sliding through darkness on the way back from Tromso, reported fog in the fiords and cloud half-way up Norway. There was a possibility Tromso might be clear by dawn, but there were distinct icing conditions (a real bogy for heavy-laden aircraft). It was not encouraging. Tait discussed it with the Met. men, and at the end he said, “All right. We’ll give it a go.”
They flew slowly to save petrol, flame floats bobbing on the water in their wake as they checked for drift. Tait had slipped in the automatic pilot and tried to doze, as he always did on outward trips over water; he believed in taking sleep when he could get it, but seldom got it.
The sky was paling in the east as they reached the Norwegian coast, turned right, climbed over the mountains and dipped into the inland valleys. The sun lifted over the horizon and the valleys lay soft under snow, flecked with bare rocks. Snow crests surrounded them, tops laced with pink like vast wedding cakes, except to the south, where the sun splintered on the ice-peaks and sparkled with the colours of the spectrum like a diamond necklace, radiantly lovely. Fog-filled lakes passed slowly below but there was no cloud. Rendezvous was a narrow lake cradled between steep hills a hundred miles southeast of Tromso, and Tait flew slowly towards it, saw no water but recognised it as a long pool of fog in the trough and over it saw aircraft circling like black flies.
He flew across it firing Very lights to draw them, and they turned in behind and started the climb towards Tromso. That was the moment the radar picked them up, and within a minute the fighter operations room at Bardufoss knew that enemy bombers were closing on the Tirpitz. At 14,000 feet the bombers were all at battle stations. One last mountain shouldered up, and as they lifted over the peak it lowered like a screen and there again, folded in the cliffs, lay Tromso Fiord and the black ship, squat in the distance, like a spider in her web of torpedo nets. It was like looking down from the “gods “on a Wagnerian stage, a beetle in green water cupped in the snowy hills, all coral and flame. There was no cloud. And no smoke screen. Tirpitz lay naked to the bomb sights.
Even the air was still. On the flanks of the gaggle Tait saw the front rank riding steadily. They seemed suspended; motionless but for the sublime hills falling slowly behind, immaculate and glowing with the beauty of sunrise and the indifference of a million years to the ugliness of the intrusion. So must many an Arctic coast burn unseen.
Far below the basin seemed to sleep in the shadow, but Tirpitz broke the spell with a salvo, sparkling from stem to stern with flashes as billows of smoke from the guns wreathed her and drifted up. Her captain had just radioed urgently to Bardufoss to hurry the fighters.
Tait opened the bomb doors and slid the pitch levers up to high revs.; the engines bellowed and the exhausts glowed even in that cold light. Black puffs stained the sky among the gaggle as the flak reached them, and then the guns round the fiord opened fire. Tait watched anxiously for the smoke pots, but the smoke never came (the pots were there all right, just brought down from Alten, but the Germans had not yet primed them). The bomb sight was on and the ship drawing nearer while the gunners in the rear turrets watched the ridges anxiously for the first fighters. It was all up to the rear gunners when the fighters came; there were no mid-upper gunners.
Now it was water, far below, sliding under the nose. Tait felt his hands on the wheel were clammy, and Daniels’ breathing rasped over the intercom. The bomber was unswerving, shaking in the engines’ thunder, and out of the cockpit Tait could see the bomb doors quivering as the air-flow battered at them. The red light came on—ten seconds to go… seconds that drag
ged till “D Dog “leapt as the grips snapped back and the bomb lurched away. Tait hauled hard over to the left and on either side saw others of the front rank doing likewise.
One by one the gaggle wheeled as the bombs went. They watched, wordless, through the perspex for thirty seconds till a great yellow flash burst on the battleship’s foredeck. From 14,000 feet they saw her tremble. Another bomb hit the shore ; two more in close succession hit the ship, one on the starboard side, by the bridge, and another abaft the funnel. Another one split the sea 5 feet from her bows, and then the smoke pall covered her and only dimly through it they saw the other bursts all inside the crinoline of nets.
One constant glare shone through the smoke. She was burning. There came another flash and a plume of steam jetted 500 feet into the air through the smoke as a magazine went up.
Three minutes later 9 Squadron bombed the dark shroud over her, and then the black flies crawling in the sky turned south-west and curved down towards the sea, picking up speed for the run home. They never saw a fighter. The last thing they saw as the smoke lifted was the Tirpitz starting to list.
The cloud they had feared closed in on the long slog home, and Tait was driving blindly through it when his artificial horizon collapsed in a mess of ball bearings and mechanism. After eleven hours in the air his eyes felt like hot coals as he focused rigidly on the other instruments; then the aerial iced up and they could not get a homing for a long time, and when they did it was a diversion. Lossiemouth was cloaked in rain, and Tait: turned east and found a small Coastal Command field, where he touched down smoothly.
At the control tower a young pilot officer asked if they had been on a cross-country, and Tait primly pursed his mouth, looked in aloof shyness at the ground and said, “Yes”.
They drove over to Lossiemouth, where they met the rest of the squadron, and were drinking in the bar when the recce plane radioed that Tirpitz was upside down in Tromso Fiord, her bottom humped over the water like a stranded whale.
It was not till after the war they found it had all been unnecessary. The bomb Tait and Daniels had dropped six weeks earlier at Alten Fiord had damaged Tirpitz beyond repair.
CHAPTER XIX BACK FROM THE DEAD
AFTER the excitement of the Tirpitz came anti-climax. Unbroken cloud lay over Europe for weeks, making high precision bombing impossible. 617 stood by constantly, were briefed hopefully a dozen times and then the cancellations came. Once they got into the air but were recalled.
Carey, Witherick and company arrived back, gloating over their taste of peacetime flesh-pots in Sweden but furious at missing the end of the Tirpitz. “You might have waited for us, sir,” Witherick said aggrievedly to Tait. “You know I always come back.”
Increasing sea losses testified to the fact that Germany’s fleet of “schnorkel “U-boats was increasing. For all the main force bombing, the U-boats found shelter in the massive concrete pens and Cochrane switched 617 on to them. They battered the pens at Ijmuiden (the port of Amsterdam) with six direct hits.
Cochrane decided that Tait had done enough. Tait had four D.S.Os. now and two D.F.Cs.—a record—and Cochrane did not want him to strain his luck too far. Shopping round for a new commander, he found no one with all the qualities he wanted till an air commodore heard the position was vacant and asked to be dropped in rank and given the job. This was Johnnie Fauquier, a Canadian, and a tough one, a thick-set, ex-bush pilot. Ten years older than most of them, he was as forceful as a steam-roller. Feeling that the war was almost over, the crews had been in a mood to relax and were scandalised when Fauquier got them out of bed in the frosty early mornings for P.T. Storms were sweeping over Europe and the runways were snowed up, so there was no flying. Fauquier gave them lectures instead, and then made them shovel snow off the runways.
More days waiting for weather; more briefings, more cancellations, till January 12, when they went to Bergen, in Norway, on the campaign against U-boats. For the first time Fauquier flew a Mosquito to direct them and for the first time in months German fighters fell on them like a swarm of hornets. They got Pryor on their first strike and he went straight into the sea. Three of them lunged at Nicky Ross on the flank of the gaggle. Watts, next to him, saw the tracer flicking into the Lancaster and lumps flying off her. He wheeled to help him, but Ross was going down, slewing into a spiral with three engines smashed. Near the water he seemed to recover; the spiral stopped, the mad dive eased and the plane had almost flattened out when it abruptly vanished in a sheet of spray. The rest took vengeance. Someone put a “tallboy” squarely on the stern of a large ship and in two minutes she had blown up, rolled over and sunk. The rest got several direct hits on the pens.
Next morning Chiefy Powell was sadly typing out the casualty report on Nicky Ross (who had been on the squadron nearly a year—longer than any other pilot) when the door swung open and in walked Ross himself.
Powell gaped.
“Wotcher, Chiefy,” quoth the ghost. “Home again!”
“Good God, sir! Where’ve you come from?”
“Air sea rescue picked us up. Cold in that dinghy.” He sat on a corner of the desk and rattled on amiably about the details.
After some splutters Powell found speech. “D’you know what I was doing when you walked in, sir? Typing your death notice!”
“Ar, hold it for a while, Chiefy,” said the cheerful Ross. “You’re a bit premature.”
Meantime the first “grand slam” was nearly ready. Like the “tallboy”, its tail had offset aero-dynamic fins to make it spul so fast in falling that the gyroscopic effect would stop it toppling as it shuddered through the sonic barrier. When the tail was put on “grand slam” would be 25 feet 6 inches long. At its thickest part it was 3 feet 10 inches in diameter, and the finished bomb was to weigh just over 22,000 Ib.
The German fighter force was nearly spent now, making it possible for 617’s inadequately armed Lancasters to penetrate deeper and deeper against the enemy by day. They carried on with “tallboys” against the U-boat pens until Eisenhower asked the Air Forces for an all-out assault on German communications. The vulnerable points were the railway bridges, and most vital of these was the Bielefeld Viaduct, not far from Bremen, main link between the Wehrmacht defending the arsenal of the Ruhr and the great centres of north-west Germany. The idea was to starve the front of men and materials and split the country into “islands” that could be taken one by one.
Three thousand tons of bombs had already been aimed at the Bielefeld Viaduct; the earth for a mile around it was torn into overlapping craters, but the 75-foot arches of the viaduct still firmly bridged the marshes for the trains running south. The light-case bombs of the main bomber forces were not powerful enough to do more than chip it. Cochrane turned 617 on to it, and so began the battle of Bielefeld.
They took off with their “tallboys” one morning, but found the viaduct under ten-tenths cloud and brought them back. Next day they tried once more but again found unbroken cloud. Days later the cloud had cleared; they flew back to Bielefeld, found it reasonably clear and a few minutes later the viaduct was hidden under smoke as the “tallboys” crashed round it. Half an hour later, when the smoke lifted, a recce aircraft found the viaduct still there. “Tallboy” craters lay in its shadow, but the viaduct was no round target like a bull’s-eye or a U-boat pen. From 18,000 feet it was almost indistinguishably threadlike. It was like trying to stick a dart in a pencil line.
They waited on the weather and tried again a few days later, but once more found it under cloud. Doggedly they went back a fifth time and turned away in fuming frustration once more. There seemed to be something diabolical about the persistence of the cloud that shielded it.
That night two heavy trailers rolled round the perimeter track to the bomb dump carrying the first two “grandslams”. In the morning armourers trollied them out and slowly winched them up into Fauquier’s and Calder’s Lancasters, specially modified in readiness for this day. They had the most powerful Merlin engines, the fuselag
es, undercarriages and main beams of the bomb bays had been strengthened and the bomb doors taken off (they could not have closed round the great girth of “Grand Slam”).
“Grand Slam” had never been tested. There had not been tune. Only one other “grand slam” existed, and that very morning a Lancaster was going to drop it over the range in the New Forest. Group was wailing for that, and also for the cloud to clear.
Just before noon Met. reported the cloud over Germany rolling away. As Fauquier was briefing his crews a phone message reached Group from the New Forest: “The beast went off all right!”
CHAPTER XX “GRAND SLAM”
A’ one o’clock 617’s engines were bursting into life round the field. Fauquier was running up his engines, testing his magnetos, when there was a crash from the starboard inner and the propeller jerked to a grinding halt as it seized. Fauquier, muttering with frustration, knew the aircraft would never get off the ground on three engines. There was only one thing to do… borrow Calder’s aircraft. The fact that he might then be shot down instead of Calder never even occurred to him, and would not have worried him if it had. He scuttled out of his plane and went haring across the field.
Calder saw the running figure, shouting and waving hands in urgent signals, guessed what had happened and cracked his throttles open. The Lancaster lurched forward and, with the small figure sprinting despairingly in the rear, rolled thunderously down the runway, picking up speed till it lifted heavily over the far fence on the way to drop the world’s biggest bomb.
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