Wings

by Patrick Bishop

  Gordon Webb was flying a Halifax that night, but felt confident in the quality of the men around him. ‘We were by all standards a capable and efficient crew,’ he wrote. ‘Each man knew his job thoroughly and we had been together and flown on operations long enough so that we were now considered a seasoned crew.’ They had no illusions about what they were facing. ‘We knew all about the percentages for and against finishing a tour. We had all long since come to terms with the possibility of one night not coming back.’ That night’s operation ‘would be, we were quite certain, a one-way trip for many’.15

  At the end of the briefing the horror of what lay ahead was apparent. ‘What this . . . really told us was that we were going to challenge the full might of the Luftwaffe’s night-fighter squadrons, plus the deadly, highly sophisticated German radar and flak defensive system. And we were going to do this under weather conditions which gave the defenders, who already held a big edge, an overwhelming advantage. It must be admitted that to a man we felt that Bomber Command HQ was being uncommonly generous with our lives.’

  On the way in they were lit up by ‘the brightest moon any enemy night-fighter could have asked for’. Cloud cover ‘simply did not exist’. The forecast winds were wrong. At the height the airmen were flying at, the engines left vapour trails that it seemed to Webb the defenders could not miss. And so it turned out. ‘The night sky seemed to be full of Jerry fighters,’ he wrote. ‘You could almost find your way to the target by navigating along the line of shattered and burning aircraft scattered across Germany . . . Death, sudden and violent, was everywhere. I lost count of the aircraft I saw shot down or blown up.’

  They reached the target and dropped their bombs. Their Halifax, ‘Pistol Packing Mama’, leapt 200 feet as the load dropped away. Then Webb had to ‘fly precisely straight and level for thirty seconds, the longest thirty seconds anyone will ever know’, in order to take the photographs demanded by operational orders to show to the intelligence officers back at base. They touched down eight and a half hours after taking off, but ‘bone tired, mentally beat though we were, sleep was out of the question’.

  It did not take long to confirm what they had suspected. Bomber Command had suffered its worst defeat of the war. Of the 795 aircraft despatched, ninety-five were lost, nearly 12 per cent of the force. Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong, starting with the route chosen, which placed the bomber stream in exceptional peril, channelling it between two radio beacons around which the night-fighters circled to await details of targets.

  The Nuremberg Raid was the darkest hour in Bomber Command’s war. What now seems extraordinary is that it did not cause a collapse in confidence in Harris, either by his masters or by the men he led.

  The vast majority of the Bomber Boys believed in the necessity and the justice of what they were doing. It was, though, little discussed. Their ability to resist fear, their fortitude, was reserved for getting through their tour of thirty trips, and the life that beckoned beyond. For some the burden was just too great. Jack Currie described, at the start of the Battle of Berlin, coming across a newly arrived sergeant pilot who was ‘a casualty neither of flak nor fighters, but of an enemy within himself. He came back early from the mission and gave as a reason the fact that he was feeling ill. Next night he took off again, but was back over Wickenby twenty minutes later. Again he said that he had felt ill in the air. I had seen the crew together in the locker room, clustered protectively around their white-faced pilot. They may have thought that some of us would vilify him, but no one except officialdom did that.’16

  That there were failures of nerve was inevitable. The problem had been recognized in the First World War when rest homes were set up in the smart Channel resort of Le Touquet, where pilots were sent to recuperate from attacks of ‘nerves’. It was accepted that such a reaction was a natural response to abnormal circumstances. By the time the next war came this commonsensical and humane view had been replaced by a more scientific approach, set out in a pamphlet circulated to base Medical Officers. While it recognized that stress was cumulative and ‘everyone has a breaking point’, it tended to blame character flaws for psychological breakdown. ‘Morale,’ it stated, ‘depends largely upon the individual’s possession of those controlling forces which inhibit the free expression of the primitive instinctive tendencies.’ In translation this meant that faced with great danger, those with the right stuff would be able to stifle their urge to run away. Procedures were set up whereby MOs examined those who were unable to carry out their duties to establish if there was a physical or nervous explanation, which could be dealt with by treatment or rest. But in an Air Ministry document, issued in April 1940, a third category was introduced. ‘It must be recognized that there will be a residuum of cases where there is no physical disability, no justification for the granting of a rest from operational employment and, in fact, nothing wrong except a lack of moral fibre.’17

  LMF, as the condition became known, was a stigma and intended as such. Sympathetic MOs tried hard to avoid such a diagnosis. But when they did the punishment was harsh and humiliating. The final judgement lay in the hands of Harold Balfour, the Under Secretary of State for Air, who had experience of combat flying from his time in the RFC in the previous war. ‘In reviewing a case my sympathies always started off with the poor fellow, as I knew only too well myself what it was like to be scared stiff in air warfare,’ he wrote. However, he also believed LMF to be ‘dangerously contagious. One crew member could start a rot, which might spread not only through his own crew, but through the whole squadron.’ If an officer was judged LMF, the punishment ‘was to take his wings away, order him to resign his commission and arrange for the army to pick him up for enlistment, probably in a labour battalion. In the case of an aircrew sergeant his flying badge was forfeited, he was reduced to the lowest rank or AC2 and put on the worst fatigues.’18 Such was the treatment of men – all volunteers – who had gone through the rigours and dangers of training and the trauma of ops, but whose courage had run dry. What is surprising to contemporary eyes is that there were so few cases of LMF. Between February 1942 and the end of the war, only 1,029 RAF airmen were thus diagnosed, most of them from Bomber Command.

  As spring turned to summer in 1944, the almost unimaginable stresses of flying bombers began to ease a little. Normandy was approaching and the final phase of a war in which the skies would belong in the main to the Allies.

  Chapter 15

  Air Supremacy

  By the summer of 1944 the Allied air forces had achieved virtual mastery of the skies of Europe. The process had begun in the long campaign to clear the Axis powers from North Africa and continued with the invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943. As the British and American air forces grew in size and quality, as their tactics and systems increased in efficiency and sophistication, the fortunes of the Luftwaffe declined.

  In northern Europe Bomber Command and the US Army Air Forces continued their epic campaign independently, there being no troops on the ground for them to support. In the Mediterranean theatre, however, the lessons of co-operation had been well-learned by now and ground attack fighters and fighter-bombers, light and heavy bombers, were meshed structurally into the overall effort. Two vital lessons had been learned from the breakout from Egypt and the advance through Libya and Tunis. One was that air superiority had to be established before any major operation could be launched with any hope of success. The second was that once the assault had begun it was essential to capture enemy airfields to maintain the air advantage and keep the momentum going.

  Gaining control of the skies was an easier proposition now as the Axis air forces went into a long downward spiral. The Luftwaffe had been bled white during the monster battles on the Eastern Front, throwing up to 1,800 aircraft into the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 to no avail. The assault by the USAAF on the German aircraft industry – Operation Pointblank – which reached its climax during 20–25 February 1944, also had a devastating effect. During those days
a thousand bombers pounded fifteen aviation hubs. They were escorted by an almost equal number of P-51B Mustang fighters, which had a range of 1,650 miles and were able to provide cover all the way to the objectives and back. The Luftwaffe came up to defend the infrastructure, just as Fighter Command had over Britain in 1940. Instead of simply surrounding their charges, the Mustangs ranged ahead of the bomber fleets, intercepting the German fighters before they arrived. In the ensuing air battles the Americans won a clear victory. By some calculations the Luftwaffe lost about 600 aircraft and 17 per cent of their pilots.

  These depredations tipped the German air force in all theatres into terminal decline. In the twelve months from July 1943 German first-line air strength in the Mediterranean theatre fell from 1,280 to 475. At the end of 1943 the Allies had 7,000 aircraft at their disposal, served by 315,000 air and ground crew.

  The enormous disparity in resources meant that when Operation Husky was launched to capture Sicily, 600 aircraft operating from Malta (under the direction of the Battle of Britain tactical wizard Sir Keith Park) kept the Germans away. Some claimed to be disappointed. ‘The Sicilian campaign has been the reverse of our anticipations,’ wrote the anonymous keeper of the 244 Fighter Wing Operations Record Book. ‘We expected the Hun to come out of his lair in droves, but though when we were in Malta there were enticing stories of formations of forty-plus lurking at judicious distances from the operations we covered and the sweeps we did, in the main he just refused to play.’ This was written after the wing, equipped with Spitfires, had flown more than 3,000 sorties, but had engaged only 131 enemy aircraft, claiming eleven destroyed and fifteen damaged.1

  By the spring of 1944 there were so many Allied aircraft in the skies that fighters were often directed onto targets only to discover they were ‘friendlies’. ‘Lunch-time patrol of Anzio,’ wrote Neville Duke, who now had a confirmed ‘victory’ for each of his twenty-two years, on 19 March. ‘On way out was sent to chase two bogeys coming in towards Naples. Intercepted and found a P38 [Lockheed Lightning fighter]. Then was sent to chase two bogeys at 26,000 feet over Cassino area. Chased around and found another P38. In fact, I think we chased ourselves quite a lot.’

  The following morning they ran into some real opposition, more than thirty Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, but the German pilots did not stay to fight. Even so, Duke’s patrol shot down three and a further two in the afternoon, pushing the squadron’s score past the 200 mark. Inevitably, this was the excuse for a ‘big party in the Mess, including all the ground crews, Squadron Cos, etc’.2

  Air superiority had been gained. The Italian experience, however, revealed an unpalatable truth. The possession of a great armada of aircraft and the delivery of vast amounts of high explosive did not guarantee victory, or even smooth progress for the forces on the ground. In December 1943 alone Allied aircraft (a category increasingly dominated by the Americans) flew 27,500 sorties and dropped 10,500 tons of bombs. Progress up the narrow, bony spine of Italy was depressingly and painfully slow, as the Germans resisted with their habitual deadly resolution.

  The lack of correlation between destructive effort and practical effect was shockingly demonstrated at Monte Cassino, the ancient Benedictine Abbey which dominated the Liri Valley and the main highway to Rome. On 15 February 1944 the Sixth Century foundation where St Benedict’s bones were laid was pounded to rubble by American bombers in the belief that it was occupied by German troops. It turned out there were none there. As John Slessor, by then commanding the RAF in the Mediterranean and Middle East, pointed out, even if this were known at the time it was unlikely to have made much difference, for ‘no man among the troops detailed to attack the Cassino position would have believed it for a moment . . . Private Doe from Detroit, Smith from Wigan, Jones from Dunedin or Yusuf Ali from Campbellpore eyed it and felt that behind those windows there must be at least an enemy observer waiting to turn the guns on him personally when the time came to attack. So the Abbey had to go.’3 It was the Catholic convictions of the German commander, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin that underlay the decision not to place troops there. Now, though, he wrote later, ‘we could occupy the Abbey without scruple, especially as ruins are better for defence than intact buildings . . . Now the Germans had a mighty commanding strongpoint, which paid for itself in all the subsequent fighting.’4

  It took until 18 May for a Polish force to occupy the ruins. Monte Cassino would have proved an enormous obstacle to the Allied advance, whether or not the Abbey had been left standing. The narrow river valleys that led northwards were dominated by high, rocky ridges that provided perfect defensive positions for an enemy as obstinate and resourceful as the Germans.

  The difficulties of the march to Rome, which did not fall until June 1944, led Slessor to set down his thoughts on the things that ‘air power can-not be expected to do in a land campaign’. The first was that ‘it cannot by itself defeat a highly organized and disciplined army, even when that army is virtually without air support of its own. The German will fight defensively, without air support or cover, and does not become demoralized by constant air attack against his communications and back areas. The heaviest and most concentrated air bombardment or organized defensive positions cannot be relied upon to obliterate resistance and enable our land forces to advance without loss.’

  What air power could do, however, to a degree which would have seemed inconceivable even two years before was ‘so to dominate the air in the battle area and in the enemy’s rear that our army can make its dispositions, supply and administrative arrangements in the most convenient manner virtually regardless of the enemy threat’. This meant that the vast organization of the invasion, involving huge supply convoys, nose-to-tail on narrow mountain roads, unprotected ammunition dumps and the great fleets of merchant vessels clogging Naples Harbour were at little risk from the arrival of a Luftwaffe bomber formation.

  For the Germans, the opposite was true. It was one of Trenchard’s maxims that ‘all land battles are confusion and muddle and the job of the air is to accentuate that confusion and muddle in the enemy’s army to a point when it gets beyond the capacity of anyone to control’. This, as Slessor was proud to point out, was what the RAF and the USAAF achieved on the road to Rome in those critical last days. ‘Roads were cratered and blocked by destroyed vehicles, telecommunications were cut, villages became a mass of rubble barring through movement, local reserves could not be moved because there was no petrol available, forward troops were out of ammunition and out of touch with their controlling headquarters, nobody knew for certain where anyone else was . . .’5

  The Allies were able to achieve this degree of disruption through a system of air control known as the ‘cab rank’. Fighter-bombers already airborne on missions against pre-selected targets were told to leave twenty minutes before they attacked to await instructions from a ground-based air controller. He would pass on by VHF radio telephone details of any enemy targets of opportunity – convoys, concentrations of troops, etc. – which showed up fleetingly, close to the front lines, for obliteration. It was a system that would work well in Normandy and the march to Berlin. It is still in use now by British forces fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.

  By the time Rome was captured the greatest military operation in history was only two days away. Air superiority had been an essential prerequisite of Operation Overlord, and D-Day had been preceded by months of aerial operations aimed not just at gaining control of the skies, but the systematic erosion of the German’s ability to recover when the invasion began. Fighters, fighter-bombers and heavy bombers were all employed in the assault. In June 1943 the RAF had established the Second Tactical Air Force (2 TAF), whose role was to support the army in the field when the troops went ashore. In January it came under the command of Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Mary’ Coningham, who had turned the Desert Air Force into a model of effective co-operation with ground forces in North Africa and Italy.

  Much of this would involve using fi
ghters and fighter-bombers in a ground attack role. Ever since the Battle of Britain the RAF had been engaged in sweeps across the Channel to maintain an offensive against tactical targets, using Spitfires and Hawker Typhoons, which had replaced the trusty but now dangerously outmoded Hurricanes. In 1943 the trains that supplied the occupation forces in France and Belgium were a favourite target. One of the masters of the art of ‘train-busting’ was Roland Beamont, a brilliant aviator who had fought with Fighter Command in the summer of 1940 and now commanded 609 Squadron, based at Manston, perched on the North Foreland in Kent. It specialized in night attacks, when most movements were made to avoid the attentions of the daytime Spitfire sweeps. According to his official biographer, under the squadrons’ cannons and rockets ‘locomotives blew up in vivid yellow-white flashes or died in clouds of gasping steam. Goods trains were raked from stem to stern.’ The armoured flak wagons hitched to the back of trains failed to provide much protection. In reaching its first century of ‘busted’ trains, the squadron lost only two pilots.6

  The work of softening up the Germans was shared with Bomber Command. The squadrons were shifted away from the deadly drudgery of area attacks on German cities to the far more precise business of raids on targets in the hinterland of the invasion coast. The operations began in April 1944 and the date marked a new and happier phase in the lives of the crews after the nightmare of the Battle of Berlin and the Nuremburg Raid. They were now engaged in attacks on railway targets in France and Belgium aimed at stopping the flow of reinforcements once the battle began. There were also raids on military camps, ammunition dumps and armaments factories in France, and (as the date for Overlord approached) against radio and radar stations and coastal artillery batteries. In the two months before D-Day, 2 TAF and Bomber Command would carry out 71,800 sorties and drop 195,400 tons of bombs. The USAAF was almost twice as active, but due to the smaller carrying capacity of their bombers dropped nearly the same tonnage. They were to bear the brunt of the Allied total losses of 1,953 aircraft for the period, with the deaths of more than 12,000 aircrew. These sacrifices had brought enormous advantages to the Allies. With the approach of D-Day, the railway network of the north of France was approaching paralysis. Those trains still running moved very slowly, under cover of darkness, and were forced to make long detours, crippling the enemy’s freedom of movement.