The applicants all shared an enthusiasm which in retrospect struck some as excessive. ‘Why did it seem to us such a good idea at the time?’ mused Jim Auton, who joined up in 1940. ‘Our side didn’t appear to stand any chance of winning the war. The United States had not yet shown any signs of joining in as combatants . . . Stalin with his millions of troops was allied with Hitler. Our gallant allies the French had swiftly capitulated to the Germans, and the British Army had been humiliatingly kicked out of the continent at Dunkirk.’ Auton decided that in his case it was ‘the chance to leave home and fly an aeroplane’ that was the ultimate lure. ‘Joining the Air Force made us feel that we were real men. Little did we realize what was in store for us – some of it good, much of it bad.’13
The waiting could last months. Eventually the volunteer was summoned to an Aircrew Reception Centre for basic training, where they marched, saluted, went on endless runs and listened to terrifying lectures from the medical officer. These, according to James Hampton, the youngest of three brothers who volunteered for aircrew and the only one to survive, warned the new arrivals, virgins almost to a man, about ‘some of the shocking and terrifying diseases that abounded and of which they had previously been unaware. These diseases had certain things in common. They could not be caught from lavatory seats and they invariably ended with general paralysis of the insane, followed shortly by death.’14
One of the main reception centres was at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Jim Auton recalled the members of his intake lining up in the Long Room while a civilian medic inspected their private parts. ‘“Get your balls up,’ he bellowed at the top of his voice as he paused in front of each of us. We were rather surprised by his vulgarity and we could not understand why he seemed to be so angry. I suppose he thought the whole process was a waste of his time. We certainly thought it was a waste of ours. “Get fell in for an FFI!” the corporal had shouted. “What on earth does that mean?” we had asked each other.’ A worldly volunteer explained that ‘They want to see if you’ve got a dose of the clap.’ They ‘tried not to stare at each other’s works as we stood there exposed and red-faced’.
Then the corporal ordered someone to fall out. ‘We craned our neck to see what was happening. Was it the clap? If so, what did it look like? As one of our number was hauled out of the ranks, we saw that one of his testicles was rather larger than an orange. The other was the usual size. How the hell did that happen? Surely not the clap – but we didn’t know the symptoms.’ The volunteers were barely out of school and ‘most of us were virgins, but keen to learn the ropes as soon as the opportunity presented itself’.15
The cadets were eventually sifted into the ‘trades’ in which they would fight the war. Their paths now diverged as they went off to specialized flying, engineering, navigation, bombing and wireless schools. The lucky ones found themselves on a ship to one of the 333 training schools in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, India and the United States, where they enjoyed a sybaritic break from the austerity of wartime Britain.
Training was fun and for many a great social adventure. Young men who would normally never have rubbed shoulders as equals found themselves flung together. Assumptions and prejudices tended to evaporate. Denholm Elliot was at RADA when the war began and volunteered for the RAF on his eighteenth birthday. He found service life ‘rather exciting. I was mixing for the first time with many different types of men from different strata of society and I found that I was [getting] on really quite well with them.’ Elliot was shot down and spent most of the war in a prison camp, before going on to become one of Britain’s best-known actors.
At the end of specialist training everyone was promoted. About two thirds became sergeants. The rest were commissioned as pilot officers. It was here that the submerged issue of class resurfaced. Despite the supposedly meritocratic nature of the RAF (in the early years, at least), there seemed to have been an institutional conviction that those whose parents were wealthy enough to send them to fee-paying schools were automatically considered officer material.
They then moved on to Operational Training Units (OTUs), the final stage before being launched into the air battle. It was here that individuals were welded into teams – the crews that would fly and die together in the cold and dark over occupied Europe. The crew henceforth became the centre of the airman’s existence. Life beyond the base – the world of family and friends – took on a distant and secondary importance. The process was called ‘crewing up’ and it showed the RAF at its most inventive and imaginative. Instead of trying to apply scientific methods to decide likely compatibility, the anonymous devisers of the system took an enormous leap of faith and allowed human chemistry to work its magic. Essentially the crews selected themselves.
The procedure was very straightforward. The requisite numbers of each aircrew category were put in a room together and told to team up. As they were all arriving from different specialist schools, no one knew anyone in the other categories. Jack Currie, a sergeant pilot who reached his OTU at the end of 1942, had ‘imagined that the process would be just as impersonal as most others that we went through in the RAF. I thought I would just see an order on the noticeboard detailing who was crewed with whom. But what happened was quite different. When we had all paraded in the hangar and the roll had been called, the chief ground instructor got up on a dais. He wished us good morning . . . and said: “Right chaps, sort yourselves out.”’
Currie looked around, trying not to stare. ‘There were bomb-aimers, navigators, wireless operators and gunners, and I needed one of each to form my crew . . . This was a crowd of strangers. I had a sudden recollection of standing in a suburban dance hall wondering which girl I should approach. I remembered that it wasn’t always the prettiest or the smartest girl who made the best companion for the evening. Anyway, this wasn’t the same as choosing a dancing partner, it was more like picking out a sweetheart or a wife, for better or for worse.’
He started off trying to find a navigator and approached a knot of them who were standing chatting together, hoping instinct would guide him to the right one. ‘I couldn’t assess what his aptitude with a map and dividers might be from his face, or his skill with a sextant from the size of his feet.’ Then he ‘noticed that a wiry little Australian was looking at me anxiously. He took a few steps forward, eyes puckered in a diffident smile and spoke: “Looking for a good navigator?”’ Currie formed an immediate impression of ‘honesty, intelligence and nervousness’. They teamed up and soon had acquired the rest of the crew. As they walked off together for a cup of tea, Currie realized that he ‘hadn’t made a single conscious choice’.16
Once formed, a crew stood by to await posting to a squadron. The process had been long and expensive. It took about £10,000 to train each crew member, the equivalent of about £800,000 in today’s money. However, the expense of getting them into battle did not mean that once they got there, their lives would be worth very much.
The revelation of how little Bomber Command was achieving meant operations had been scaled down during the winter of 1941–2 to husband resources and await the arrival of the heavies.
In the spring of 1942 the force was better equipped and had a new, aggressive and ambitious officer at its head. Harris came armed with some new ideas on how bombers should be used. He believed strongly in the principle of concentration. Instead of smallish numbers of aircraft being despatched to two or three different targets in a night, large numbers would saturate one objective. Harris favoured fire as the principle tool of destruction. It was easier, he calculated, to burn down a city than to blow it up. Very small, light incendiary bombs were horribly effective when showered on old buildings. The method would be to first drop high explosive bombs that would rip off roofs and blow down walls, choking the streets with rubble that would hamper the work of firemen and rescue teams. Then the four-pound magnesium incendiaries would float down into the wreckage, starting fires that would be whipped up by the winds generated by the blasts. The aim was, he sta
ted bluntly, to ‘start so many fires at the same time that no fire-fighting services, however efficiently and quickly they were reinforced by the fire brigades of other towns, could get them under control.’17
Harris selected an easy target on which to try out the method. Lübeck, an old Hanseatic port on the Baltic, had only minor strategic importance, but it was easy to find and given that many of the houses were partly built of wood was easier than most cities to set on fire. On the night of 28–29 March – Palm Sunday – 234 aircraft took off into clear skies and headed north and east, guided on their way for much of the journey by Gee, with which the first wave of bombers was equipped. Wellingtons made up most of the force with twenty-six Stirlings and twenty-one Manchesters, the unsatisfactory precursor of the Lancaster. The target was only lightly defended and pilots felt safe enough to bomb from a mere 2,000 feet. More than 400 tons of bombs were dropped. Of these, two thirds were incendiaries. The aiming point was the centre of the Altstadt, the old town, a quaint jumble of narrow streets and half-timbered houses. They went up like tinder. Harris had organized the attack into three waves, with the idea that the fires set by the first wave would make it easier for the succeeding one to find and bomb. So it turned out.
In the days following the raid the images brought back by aircraft from the RAF’s Photo Reconnaissance Unit were studied eagerly. The story they told was very different from the catalogue of failure analysed by David Bensusan-Butt. For once an air raid had achieved what it set out to do. The purpose had been, unashamedly, to lay waste the town and that is what had happened, by and large. It was calculated that 190 acres of Lübeck – 30 per cent of the built-up area – had been burned down. It was an overestimate, but not a wild one. By the Germans’ reckoning, 3,401 buildings had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Among them was a factory that made oxygen equipment for U-boats. But the beautiful Marienkirche had also gone up in the conflagration. Up to 320 people were killed, the largest number in a raid on Germany so far, but still considerably fewer than the more than 1,400 who died when the Luftwaffe blitzed London on the night of 10–11 May 1941. Only twelve aircraft were lost, most on the outward journey.
Harris was delighted. Even with the limited force of obsolescent aircraft available, the formula of concentration plus incendiaries, when applied to a target the size of a town, produced devastating results. He repeated the feat a month later with four raids in quick succession on Rostock, another old Hanseatic town.
By the end of May Harris was ready for a real spectacular. He understood the power of publicity and was keen to mount an operation that would win him and his men attention and prestige, as well as boosting British morale. He hit on the idea of launching a ‘thousand-bomber raid’. The phrase would resonate in the press in Britain and across the Atlantic. He took the idea to Churchill. The Prime Minister was a sucker for a grand gesture. The project was irresistible. The problem was that Harris had nothing like a thousand serviceable bombers standing by. To reach the magic number he had to drag in aircraft and crews from Operational Training Units.
On the night of 30–31 May, a bright, clear, moonlit night, the great raid was launched. There were 1,047 aircraft, most of them old types, but including seventy-three Lancasters. The volume of aircraft meant they had to move in a ‘bomber stream’, flying through different air corridors to reduce the risk of collisions. The target was Cologne, Germany’s third largest city and an important industrial centre. In his departing address to the crews, Harris left them in no doubt about the significance of the mission. The force, he told them, was ‘at least twice the size and has at least four times the carrying capacity of the largest air force ever before concentrated on one objective.’ They were making history. ‘You have an opportunity,’ he declared, ‘to strike a blow at the enemy which will resound, not only throughout Germany but throughout the world.’
They were carrying 1,455 tons of bombs, two thirds of which were incendiaries, and the results were awe-inspiring. One airman, Ralph Wood, looking down from his Halifax, saw what looked like ‘the embers of a huge bonfire’. The conflagration destroyed more than 13,000 homes, mostly apartments, and seriously damaged 6,360 more. Nine hospitals, seventeen churches, sixteen schools and four university buildings were either burnt or blown down. The death toll set a new record: at least 469 people were killed, almost all of them civilians.
News of the raid was received with enthusiasm by a British public eager for revenge for Coventry. It was, for the time being, exceptional. Bomber Command did not have the men or machines to keep up the tempo, and a rhythm of regular mass raids would not be established until the following year. The importance of the Cologne raid was that it established the feasibility of the concept, and by extension the value of the strategic bombing campaign. Henceforth, strategic bombing was at the heart of Allied war planning. It meant a crucial prioritization in the allocation of resources. Aircraft that were dedicated to blasting Germany could not be used in other theatres, even one so vital to Britain’s survival as the war being fought in the sea lanes of the Atlantic.
Chapter 12
Seabirds
The Battle of the Atlantic could be said to have begun in the first days of the war. It would be just as vital for Britain’s survival as a free nation as the Battle of Britain. Aircraft had a crucial part to play if the struggle was to be won. Unlike their counterparts in Fighter Command, Coastal Command and the Fleet Air Arm went into the contest woefully equipped, and although a procurement programme promised better days to come, it would be some time before they arrived.
Coastal Command’s duties, as laid out in 1937, were ‘trade protection, reconnaissance and co-operation with the Royal Navy’. Of these, ‘trade protection’ would be the most important. The innocuous phrase disguised the enormity of what was at stake. ‘Dominating all our power to carry on the war, or even keep ourselves alive, lay our mastery of the ocean routes and the free approach and entry to our ports,’ observed Winston Churchill.1 What that meant was that unless Britain could keep the sea lanes to the Americas open, the war machine would sputter to a halt for lack of fuel and the population would start to starve.
Remarkably little attention was paid in the interwar years to the business of securing the trade routes. The experience of the spring of 1917, when U-boats sank almost a million tons of shipping in a single month, had been soon forgotten. Then, it had seemed possible to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Jellicoe, that the war might be lost if no antidote were found to the German submarines. One was: the adoption of a convoy system where merchantmen sailed protected by warships and, latterly, air escorts. By the time the new war started, new technology had arrived and convoys were out of fashion. The development of Asdic – underwater sonic detection – had advanced to the point where the naval staff felt able to state that ‘the submarine should never again be able to present us with the problem we were faced with in 1917’.2 The Admiralty was therefore confident that only a small air element would be needed to handle the underwater threat. As to attack by enemy aircraft, the development of the multiple pom-pom gun was thought to be an adequate defence and deterrent.
This hubris was soon punished. Asdic was valuable, but not infallible. After the great conquests of the spring and early summer of 1940, Germany controlled a coastline that stretched from the North Cape in northern Norway to Bordeaux. U-boats, long-range bombers and surface raiders had a multitude of bases on the French Atlantic seaboard from which to sally out. The toll rose steadily. In June 1940 they sank ships totalling nearly 400,000 tons. These disasters forced a change of heart. The navy reverted to the convoy system and the task of providing aerial protection from the ravages of U-boats and long-range bombers fell largely on Coastal Command’s willing but pitifully equipped squadrons.
At the start of the war it had thirteen squadrons of aircraft and six of flying boats, organized in three groups. Their commander was Air Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill, then fifty-nine. He had started life as a merchant seaman. After taking flying l
essons, he joined the RNAS and commanded HMS Empress during the Cuxhaven raid on Christmas Day 1914. According to the Air Ministry mandarin Maurice Dean, ‘he had seawater in his veins (and) an appreciation of naval needs based on a lifetime’s experience’.3
Bases were scattered around the fringes of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It had been estimated that 261 shore-based aircraft would be needed to secure Britain’s maritime defence; 165 for convoy escort duty and 96 for reconnaissance. When war broke out, there were 259, which seemed to bode well. However, the paper strength disguised a fundamental weakness. At this stage Coastal Command was the ‘Cinderella Service’, jostled aside in the rush for resources by the demands of Fighter and Bomber Commands. Only one of the aeroplane squadrons had an aeroplane that was up to the job: the American-manufactured Lockheed Hudson. Eight of the rest had Ansons, and two had torpedo-carrying and obsolescent Vildebeests. The crews called the Anson ‘Faithful Annie’ and it was as dependable and unexciting as the nickname suggests. It had been built as a six-seater passenger plane with a maximum speed of about 190 mph. Despite this, its reach was inadequate for its function. An Anson was incapable of getting all the way to the Norwegian coast – a vital area of naval activity – and back. It also posed very little threat to any enemy vessel it might encounter. ‘The Anson was quite useless in any active wartime role, except a limited anti-submarine patrol to protect shipping, and was really obsolete before 1939,’ judged Wing Commander Guy Bolland, who commanded Coastal Command’s 217 Squadron, based at St Eval. ‘The performance bomb load and armament were totally inadequate.’4
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