Wings

by Patrick Bishop

  The Luftwaffe was incapable of mounting a serious challenge to Allied air supremacy, but it could never be completely written off. On 16 December the German army launched its last desperate counter-offensive in the Ardennes. Operation Bodenplatte had been intended to provide limited air superiority to cover the thrust, but it was repeatedly delayed by bad weather. It was not launched until New Year’s Day 1945, when, having somehow scraped together more than 750 fighters and enough fuel to keep them airborne, the Germans mounted a surprise attack. To the astonishment of the Allies, waves of aircraft arrived over seventeen airfields in the Lowlands, destroying 150 aircraft and killing forty-six, most of them ground crew members. It was an impressive act of defiance, but made no difference. German losses were heavy and unsustainable. About 270 German aeroplanes were destroyed. Adolf Galland, the fighter ace who became a Luftwaffe general, regarded this as the pointless, last gasp of his force. ‘In this forced action we sacrificed our last substance,’ he wrote. ‘The Luftwaffe received its death blow at the Ardennes offensive.’13

  The Allies now had the air to themselves. The power they had accumulated was demonstrated by an event that would become synonymous with the indiscriminate destructiveness of the strategic air campaign. On the morning of Monday, 13 February 1945, Roy Lodge, a twenty-one-year-old bomb aimer with 51 Squadron, and his crew were told they were on ‘ops’ that night. They got on with routine preparations, while waiting to learn the target. That afternoon in the briefing room, Lodge recalled, ‘the CO addressed us with, “Gentlemen, your target for tonight is . . . Dresden.”’ The news produced some groans and whistles. The target was distant, requiring a round trip of eight and a half hours. Lodge, a Cambridge undergraduate before volunteering for Bomber Command, read later that some of those who took part experienced beforehand ‘a sense of foreboding, as though they felt some terrible act was about to be committed’. For him and his crew, however, ‘Dresden was just another target, though a long, long way away.’14

  The British – and the Americans who also took part in the operation – were acting at the request of the Soviets, who were concerned at the build-up of German troops in the town, threatening their advance. Operation Thunderclap would turn out to be a catastrophic success. Two waves of aircraft, more than 800 in all, dropped 2,600 tons of bombs. Roy Lodge, in the second wave, was a hundred miles from Dresden when he saw the horizon throbbing with light. ‘As I drew closer I saw the cause of the glow,’ he wrote. ‘Ahead was the most enormous fire. Ahead, and then below us were great patches, pools, areas of flame.’ Lodge’s crews were meant to be dropping markers, but it hardly seemed necessary. ‘We added our own long line of flares to those already across the target. I saw white flashes of bomb explosions and more sparkling incendiaries. As we completed our run across the target and turned away on our homeward journey, I could see the pools of flame were joining up in one huge inferno.’

  The firestorm Lodge witnessed consumed about 25,000 people. Coming so close to the end of the conflict, the vast toll of mostly innocent lives sparked unease, then embarrassment, then guilt. Churchill was soon seeking to distance himself from the massacre, noting in a memo to Portal and the Chiefs of Staff Committee at the end of March that ‘the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of the Allied bombing’. It was the start of a process that was to make the strategic bombing campaign an awkward subject in the post-war years, and historians overlooked the vast contribution made by Bomber Command to the Allied victory and the liberation of Europe. For decades it meant that the honour and respect due to the 55,000 young men who died in its operations were withheld. Even today it is rarely admitted that it was the scale of destruction suffered by Germany – largely wrought by the bombers – that brought about the Germans’ conversion to the path of peace and democracy.

  Dresden cast a tragic shadow over the RAF’s extraordinary achievement. At the start of the war only Fighter Command could be said to be in a condition to face the tasks ahead. By the end of the conflict all branches were operating with superb efficiency, laying waste an evil enemy and protecting the innocent over land and sea. By VE Day the RAF had more than 9,000 aircraft on charge, and more than a million men and women in its ranks, from all across the British dominions. The contribution of the ground crews, ‘the forgotten ones’ as Philip Joubert called them in his book commemorating their deeds, was vital. In the words of John Terraine, a great historian of the RAF, many would ‘rather die than admit to any pride in their part in what they would like to present as a most almighty “eff-up” from beginning to end’.

  As for those who flew, ‘in those young men we may discern the many faces of courage, the constitution of heroes; in lonely cockpits at dizzy altitudes, quartering the treacherous and limitless sea, searching the desert’s hostile glare, brushing the peaks of high mountains, in the ferocity of low-level attack, or the long, tense haul of a bombing mission, in fog, in deadly cold, in storm, on fire, in a prison camp . . . in a skin-grafting hospital.’15 It is hard to disagree with his judgement that in Britain’s great battle for the freedom of the world, it was the RAF that held the traditional place of honour in the order of battle on the Right of the Line.

  With Germany’s collapse Bomber Command turned from taking life to giving it. From April onwards, Lancasters and Mosquitoes flew nearly 3,000 missions on Operation Manna, delivering 7,000 tons of food to the starving population of Western Holland. This was followed by Operation Exodus to airlift the 75,000 British servicemen in German prisoner-of-war camps.

  Then began the same great dismantling that had followed the end of the last conflict. In their hundreds of thousands the non-professionals who made up the vast majority of the air forces handed in their uniforms, received back a demob overcoat, sports coat, flannels and pair of shoes and stepped out into the real world. It was a battered and shabby world and not particularly welcoming. But it was what they wanted and what they had fought to save.

  Chapter 16

  Jet

  At 11.01 on the morning of 9 August 1945 Leonard Cheshire was in the nose of an American B-29 bomber, heading for the Japanese city of Nagasaki. ‘Suddenly,’ he wrote later, ‘it was there.’ In the distance, a diamond shard of intense light expanded into a sheet of brilliance. Cheshire was flying as an official British observer, but due to the pilot’s reluctance to endanger his passenger, he did not get as close to the seat of the explosion as he would have liked. What he did see was a vast cloud of smoke, ash and dust rising out of a boiling sea of fire. It had an ‘evil kind of luminous quality . . . the colour of sulphur’.1

  ‘Fat Man’, the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki, killed about 35,000 people outright. ‘Little Boy’, dropped three days earlier on Hiroshima, killed 70,000–80,000 people. Neither wreaked as much destruction as the conventional bombs dropped on Tokyo five months earlier, which started a firestorm that took about 100,000 lives. It was the nature of the new weapon and its obvious potential that was significant. The world had entered the nuclear age and the shape of military aviation would also change to accommodate this new and awesome fact.

  A second, more benign development would also affect profoundly the nature of flying, both military and civil. Before the Second World War had reached its end it was clear that the future belonged to jets. Britain had been at the forefront of this development, thanks largely to the efforts of one man. Frank Whittle was born in 1907 in Earlsdon, a suburb of Coventry, a city with a long tradition of engineering. His father, Moses, was a foreman in a machine-tool factory, who left to start his own business. When it failed, young Frank was forced to leave school. He spent much of his time learning about gas and steam engines in the local library. He applied to join the RAF as an apprentice, but, at a shade over five feet tall, did not meet the regulation height. He persisted, and was let in on his third attempt. It was a tribute to the Trenchard system that his talents were recognized and in 1928 Frank Whittle was sent off to Cranwell as an officer cadet.

>   He won a reputation as a stunt pilot. It was his intellectual qualities, though, that attracted most attention. In his graduation thesis he came up with the ideas that would make his name and ultimately transform flight. He asserted that for aeroplanes to reach speeds of 500 mph or faster they would have to fly at much greater heights than they did at present, to take advantage of the reduced drag resulting from lower air density. Neither propellers nor piston engines functioned well in thin air. A new kind of engine was needed.

  The notion of a jet engine had been around for some years. The principle was relatively simple. Air was compressed, fuel was fed into it and ignited. The resulting explosion produces gases, which, if directed backwards, generate thrust. The great problem was how to compress the air in the first place.

  Eighteen months after writing his thesis Whittle came up with a solution. He calculated that there could be enough energy produced at the explosive stage to not only provide thrust but to also to turn a turbine which would drive an air compressor. Thus was born the ‘turbojet’ and Whittle took out a patent in 1930. He passed the idea on to the Air Ministry, which showed little interest. The patent lapsed.

  Four years later Whittle was at Cambridge, sponsored by the RAF, and resumed work on his ideas. He re-filed the patents, and since the university had no aeronautical laboratory facilities he sought outside backers to take his research forward. He joined forces with two retired RAF officers and, with assistance from investment bankers, in March 1936 he formed British Power Jets. After pausing to take a first-class honours degree, Whittle got to work designing a prototype. In April 1937 the first turbojet was ready for testing, and by the following year its fan, which controlled the thrust, was measured revolving at speeds of up to 12,000 revolutions per minute.

  At a University Air Squadron dinner Whittle met Henry Tizard, the chairman of the Government’s Aeronautical Research Committee. Tizard quickly grasped the importance of the invention and pressed it on the Air Ministry. With tragicomic predictability the bureaucrats reacted with suspicion rather than gratitude, invoking the Official Secrets Act and the fact that Whittle was a serving officer to bilk him of a fair price for his invention. By the time work started on an airframe, manufactured by the Gloster Aircraft Company (chosen on the basis that they did not have many orders on their books at the time) and with an engine made by Rover, the Second World War had started and the project did not get the energy and resources it required. An experimental Gloster fighter flew in May 1941, attracting Winston Churchill’s enthusiasm and demands for development to be speeded up. Other priorities intervened, however, and the war was almost over by the time the first Gloster Meteors took to the skies.

  The Germans had already developed their own jet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe (Swallow). It had a beautiful, streamlined design and its two underslung engines could speed it through the air at about 560 mph – too fast, initially, for its guns to be brought to bear effectively. It went into service in July 1944 and by the end of the war was reckoned to have shot down about 540 Allied aircraft.

  The first Meteors arrived at Fighter Command’s 616 Squadron at the same time and went into action the following month against V-1s, shooting down fourteen by the time the flying bomb threat was over. The earliest version suffered from several design defects and it was not until the end of January 1945 that it was fit for service in Europe. The Meteor and Schwalbe never met in aerial combat and the forty-six German aircraft claimed on behalf of the British jet were all destroyed in ground attacks.

  Refinements and improvements ironed out the initial problems. By 1946 sixteen squadrons were equipped with Meteors. The Government had handed over the Whittle jet to the Americans during the war, but they had been slow to develop it. In 1946 Britain found itself at the leading edge of a transforming technology and it was anxious to advertise its dominance and to reap the commercial benefits.

  Jets were all about speed. In late 1945 Group Captain H. J. ‘Willie’ Wilson roared over Herne Bay in Kent at 606 mph to establish a new world air speed record. The Americans set about mounting a challenge with the Lockheed Shooting Star. To push the prize beyond their reach, the RAF’s High Speed Flight, founded in June 1946 to explore the boundaries of jet power, made another attempt to ratchet up the record.

  Jet test pilots found themselves in a similar situation to that of the first aviation pioneers. The aircraft were immeasurably more sophisticated and powerful. The element of risk, however – of not knowing what your aircraft might or might not do – was just as acute. The consequences if things went wrong were even more drastic. In the case of engine failure, the canvas, wood and wire contraptions of forty years before might well flutter to earth without mishap. Jets plummeted, and ejector seats were not fitted in the early models.

  The uncertainties were related by Squadron Leader Bill Waterton, a handlebar-mustachioed, pre-war RAF professional and wartime fighter pilot, who, together with the HSF commander Group Captain Teddy Donaldson, flew Meteors on the next attempt on the speed record in the summer of 1946. Huge publicity surrounded the event, fanned by the Air Ministry, which was anxious to raise a glow of national pride from the ashes of post-war ennui. Success depended on optimum weather conditions – the warmer the better. August was cool and drizzly and there were endless postponements. Eventually, on the afternoon of Saturday, 7 September 1946, conditions brightened enough for the pair to have a go. Donaldson took off first, at 5.45 p.m., and landed fourteen minutes later. Waterton followed at eleven minutes past six. The international regulations proscribed that the test course was short and the altitude was minimal, less than 1,100 feet. Waterton’s Meteor Mark 4 was ‘a lovely craft, easy to fly, docile, and as smooth as silk’. That was at relatively low speeds. As it approached 600 miles an hour the port wing tended to dip and no amount of trimming seemed able to cure the fault.

  At first things went well. ‘I opened the throttles fully to 15,200 revolutions per minute,’ he wrote later. ‘The engines bit into the densely packed air, chewed and swallowed it, then spat it out at supersonic speed through the red-hot tails of the jet pipe nozzles. I felt tensely confident.’ Then, as ‘the air speed indicator crawled up to 580. The cow’s putting port wing down as usual . . . Behave yourself you slut!’2

  As he broke through the 600 mph mark the wing dug in deeper. It took all the strength in his arms to keep the stick straight and all the weight of his fourteen stones to jam on the rudder and counteract the leftward drift. After a sweaty few seconds he roared inland at Brighton and touched down, content to have survived. Later he learned that Donaldson had raised the bar to 616 mph. Waterton had managed to record a speed only two miles an hour behind him. Success did not mollify his indignation at the pressure he felt had been heaped on him to take unnecessary risks. The attempt, he judged, might easily have ended in ‘prestige-shattering, disastrous failure’. The Meteor went on to be a staple of the post-war RAF, but safety was never one of its virtues. Nearly 900 were lost and 450 pilots killed in its years of service.

  Jets claimed a fair number of lives on the ground. There were no whirring propellers to advertise danger, which sometimes had fatal consequences for the unwary. Colin Walker Downes, who we last heard of watching the dogfights over London in 1940, recalled how ‘one day, while standing outside the squadron dispersal during a Meteor ground run, I saw an airman walk across the front of the aircraft and in an instant disappear, as if in a magic show, followed by a loud bang as the impeller turbine disintegrated. Running over to the aircraft as the fitter shut down the engines, we found no protective grills over the engine intakes and no sign of the airman, apart from one black shoe lying on the ground.’3

  Flying jets and flying propeller-driven fighters were different experiences. Walker Downes had done both and knew which he preferred. ‘Gone was the rasping, clattering noise of the twelve cylinders combined with the propeller noise as the propeller heaved the aircraft into the air with the blade tips approaching the speed of sound, before the aircraf
t settled down to a lengthy climb to altitude. Instead the surge of the jet thrust projected the aircraft rapidly into the air and the rate of climb to altitude was initially quite breathtaking. With the pilot insulated within the pressurized cockpit, the whine of the jet engine penetrating the flying helmet was muted and soon ignored, and the flight was smooth and seemingly effortless.’

  It seemed to Downes that this was the closest that man had got to experiencing the true sensation of flight. Flying through the tropopause, the atmospheric threshold to the stratosphere, the effects of weather ceased and ‘one could view one’s progress through space, marked by the condensation trails of the jet engine as it traced a broad white chalk line across the sky against a deep azure board. At such times, if flying alone with the radio silent, there was an incredible feeling of not being part of this world, especially if above cloud, and regardless of one’s religious beliefs, the effect was one of wonder.’4

  In America the end of the war came as a relief rather than a cause for celebration. The country retreated into one of its intermittent bouts of isolationism, from which it was only reluctantly aroused when the extent of Soviet hostility towards the West was recognized. Even so, Washington was reluctant to share nuclear technology with its old ally, and Britain was forced to make its own way into the atomic age. By the end of 1947 a nuclear arms programme was under way to develop an independent bomb. The RAF would have the job of delivering it. It was now all too clear which enemy the bombs would be aimed at. The partnership between the free and communist worlds had started to fall apart even before victory was declared. Stalin had made it clear that the Soviet Union would be expanding eastwards. A dark red shadow fell across Eastern Europe. West Berlin alone stood out. In 1948 Moscow began to choke off the road and rail routes into the city, leaving its 2 million inhabitants in the free area the choice of starvation or amalgamation with their communist neighbours.