by Peter Rees
Another Australian, twenty-one-year-old Jack Davenport, was posted to 455 Squadron RAAF, flying twin-engined Hampdens that were already close to obsolete. The squadron, the first RAAF bombing unit in England, had been formed in June 1941. A second squadron, No. 458, was formed on 1 September that year. Equipped with Wellington bombers, 458 Squadron carried out its first raid six weeks later. By the end of the year, a third Australian unit, No. 460 Squadron, would also be formed.
Despite having less than nineteen hours on the Hampden, Jack soon showed he could coax the best out of the plane, even after an almost fatal spin in which he ordered the crew to bail out. When he realised his navigator had not heard the message, he stayed with the aircraft. Jack began bombing Hamburg and the Ruhr. ‘During this, the latter part of 1941, any visit to the Ruhr was a dicey experience,’ he recalled. ‘It was the industrial heart of Germany, which was extremely well defended, and they had hundreds and hundreds of searchlights. In those days a raid of one hundred or two hundred planes was a fairly reasonable turnout.’
The squadron adopted the tactic of flying low to avoid anti-aircraft fire. ‘We’d go in at about 7000 feet and maybe lower than the main run of squadrons. We thought that if the German ack-ack fired at us then the shell on the way up, before it exploded, actually had to hit us. However, if we were on top when the shells exploded there’d be quite a bit of shrapnel around.’ To be caught by searchlights was Jack’s worst fear. ‘One got you and the whole cone of searchlights would come up on you, and they lit up an area of some acres.’
To counter this, the squadron developed some unusual techniques. ‘We knew that some of the searchlights were sound-controlled and we would take along a couple of empty beer bottles and drop them over the side and on one occasion we saw the searchlights follow the beer bottles down—that was encouraging.’ Another time, however, when Jack was caught full in the searchlights’ glare, the beer bottles didn’t work.
Jack soon realised that the Germans were clever with their camouflage, often providing false targets lit with artificial fires ten to fifteen kilometres from the true target. ‘At Hamburg, there was a lake which should have been clearly identifiable on most moonlight nights, but they covered it with wooden rafts so we couldn’t see the water.’ After one trip to Hamburg, Jack returned to find that his fuselage had been holed 177 times. He lost an engine on the way back as well, but the remaining engine still worked.
Lethal night fighters and German ground defence were not the only hazards the Australians faced. Having survived the open-door scare on his first Whitley flight, Sam Weller was ordered to the Polish industrial port of Szczecin with 102 Squadron RAF on the night of 29–30 September. Returning after eleven hours in the air, he ran out of fuel at 4 a.m. Before ditching the bomber, he just had time to radio back to base. Both engines died when the plane hit the water and bounced along the surface. With its fuel tanks empty, however, it was buoyant enough to stay afloat until the crew had jumped out in the darkness and scrambled onto the upturned dinghy. Air Sea Rescue launches picked up Sam and his crew about five hours later and took them to Bridlington Harbour.
Transported back to their base at Topcliffe, they were met by the group captain. After giving a statement about the incident, Sam left. Outside, and without his hat or his flying boots, which had filled with water and sunk, Sam was accosted by the station warrant officer.
He wasn’t worried a bit about the boots and me standing there in the cold. ‘Where’s your cap? You’re a troublemaker, the group captain is always complaining about you.’
I knew that was a lie because I’d just been talking to him. ‘Where’s your cap?’ He got his book out.
‘My cap is at the bottom of the North Sea. If you want it you can go and get it.’
With that, Sam hobbled away.
Meanwhile, 458 Squadron RAAF prepared for its first operation. On the night of 20–21 October 1941, the squadron took off from the Holme-on-Spalding Moor station in Yorkshire to bomb Belgium’s busy Antwerp docks. The second pilot in one Wellington was a former Australian journalist, twenty-year-old Sergeant Phil Crittenden, from Melbourne. He had enlisted early under the Empire Air Training Scheme and had completed his pilot training in Saskatoon, Canada.
By midnight on the 20th, they had been airborne for around six hours when a ME 110 attacked, badly damaging the Wellington. The aircraft broke up shortly afterwards, and crashed at Marchienne, near Charleroi, in Belgium. The rear gunner, an English sergeant, was the only survivor of the six-man crew. Phil Crittenden became the first Australian serving in Bomber Command to be killed in action.
So began the harrowing process of informing his parents—one that would settle into a grim pattern over the next three and a half years. On 23 October, Phil’s father was sent a telegram reporting him as missing on operations. Then, on 1 November, a letter arrived, saying that it was ‘presumed that the aircraft was lost over its target owing to enemy action’. A telegram followed six days later saying that Phil was now believed ‘killed in action’. An official letter received on the 15th informed the family that ‘unfortunately, the Air Ministry has always very strong grounds for expressing a belief that a member of the Air Force has lost his life’, and that the telegram must therefore ‘be regarded as based upon reports received from a reliable source’.
The final, crushing blow came in a letter on 27 January 1942, in which the Air Board advised that according to the International Red Cross Society, an official German list showed that Phil had been buried at Charleroi.
4
THE THOUSAND PLAN
An expectant air filled the Nissen hut in Yorkshire as the commanding officer of 460 Squadron RAAF, Wing Commander Arthur Hubbard, prepared for a historic briefing. The solidly built twenty-five-year-old, who came from Morriset on the New South Wales central coast, was the first Australian to command an all-Australian squadron in Bomber Command. He directed the attention of those present to a map on a wall at the far end of the room. A red marker on the map showed the Wellington crews their target for that night, 12 March 1942—the German North Sea port of Emden, the Ruhr valley’s sea port via the Dortmund–Ems canal.
Hubbard, who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1940 and had served with two RAF squadrons in England and the Middle East, had joined the RAF on a short-service commission before the war began. He started by calling out the names of captains who were listed for the raid before a Met officer outlined the weather they could expect on the flight. There would be fluffy cumulus cloud on the way and ‘10/10 cloud’ over the target, which meant conditions would be overcast.
The intelligence officer followed, explaining that Emden contained U-boat construction yards and was an important transshipment centre for Scandinavian iron ore. ‘However, you are to aim for the heart of the town, and your bombing height is 15,000 feet. Your bomb load will be six by 500 G.P. [General Purpose] bombs,’ he said, adding that while 460 Squadron was attacking Emden, another sixty-eight Wellingtons would be bombing Kiel, one of Germany’s major naval bases and shipbuilding centres. He warned that Emden’s defences were strong.
You can expect heavy searchlight concentration, which ring the town to the south, east and west. Flak is also pretty well concentrated: it is estimated they have several hundred of their 4.7’s defending the target, plus about 500 of the light 40mm type anti-aircraft gun. You may also encounter reasonable night-fighter opposition, although it is probable they will concentrate on the main force attacking Kiel.
The officer advised the crews they would take off at 2030 hours. Because of the weather, it was essential that they stay ‘bang on course all the way’. They could select their own routes to the target, but he suggested they heed the advice of the two squadron leaders. Arthur Hubbard concluded the briefing with a general summary of the operation: ‘Well, chaps, this is the moment we have all been waiting for. This is the squadron’s first operation, the climax to the months of training you have all put in, and as our first squadron in Bombe
r Command you have a big responsibility to set the standard. I know you will not fail.’
At take-off, each Wellington, with its six-man crew, was met by cheers and shouts from the rest of the squadron lining the runway. The cloud cover forecast by the Met officer set in over the North Sea and stayed with them for the full journey. In contrast to Kiel, where bombs were successfully dropped and badly damaged the shipyards and naval dockyard, the Emden operation was a failure: all the bombs fell more than eight kilometres off-target.
Two of those on the raid were pilot officers Bill Brill, twenty-five, and Arthur Doubleday, twenty-nine, who flew as second pilots. They both came from farms in the Riverina, in southern New South Wales, and were almost as close as brothers. Bill explained later that because nothing could be seen through the cloud, the skipper nosed in towards the thickest part of the flak on the assumption that something below it must be worth defending.
But every time we lined up on the best concentration and began to run in, the flak fizzled out and we’d be left seemingly pointed into nothingness. It did seem as if the artful Hun knew exactly what we were at and ran us around in circles for half an hour or more. There was no alternative but to select what might have been the city area and let the bombs go and hope for the best. I suppose at the worst we should have frightened a cow or two off her milk, which may have in turn deterred the German war machine!
The initial organisation of Bomber Command left much to be desired. The approach was almost haphazard. Plans were in the hands of squadron commanders, who were mostly left to attack as they chose. Group Headquarters played no part. If a raid clashed with an Entertainments National Service Association concert, some commanders would wait until it was over before taking off. Others took off early, which meant a raid could be spread over a few hours, with many individual runs.
On 7 November 1941 Sir Richard Peirse, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, ordered a major raid on Berlin, but of the 160 bombers that took off more than twenty were shot down or crashed. Little damage was done. Peirse was sacked in January 1942 and soon afterwards replaced by Arthur Harris. ‘Bomber’ Harris, as he later became known, believed unequivocally in both the efficacy and necessity of area bombing. As he put it, the Nazis had entered the war under the ‘rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them’. He continued: ‘At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’
Harris set about rectifying Bomber Command’s deficiencies. New navigational equipment and new planes were becoming available. Halifax aircraft, first operational in July 1941, were now arriving in large numbers. The Avro Lancaster flew on operations for the first time on the night of 10–11 March 1942, when two joined another 124 Wellingtons, Hampdens, Avro Manchesters and Stirlings in an ineffectual raid on the Krupps factory at Essen.
Three weeks later, on 2 April 1942, 455 Squadron’s Jack Davenport was among twenty-three Hampdens and seven Wellingtons involved in a mine-laying attack—or ‘gardening’ op as it was called—at Quiberon Bay, on France’s Biscay coast. Although the flak was heavy, Jack successfully laid his mine and bombed an aerodrome before leaving the target as fast as he could. Back at the base, he learned that fellow 455 Squadron member, Pilot Officer John Maloney, who had taken off just one minute before him, had failed to return. Maloney, a twenty-nine-year-old from Wagga Wagga, and his three crew were the first all-RAAF crew in Bomber Command to be killed. No trace of them was ever found. On 27 April, 455 Squadron was transferred to Coastal Command, a few weeks after 458 Squadron had been posted to the Middle East.
On 10 April, the first Lancasters were lost when eight went down on a raid to Essen. A week later, in a daring and disastrous daylight raid on a diesel engine works in Augsburg, seven of twelve Lancasters were shot down. Despite this, it was not long before the Lancaster became the basis of British bombing operations. But owing to the mediocrity of the Lancaster’s defensive weaponry, it was mostly used for night raids. The key to the Lancaster’s success was a huge bomb bay capable of carrying the largest bombs used by the RAF, including the 4000-lb, 8000-lb, or 12,000-lb Blockbusters. These loads were often supplemented with smaller bombs or incendiaries.
As the Lancasters came into service, a young Melburnian, Peter Isaacson, was completing his training on Wellingtons. Twenty-two-year-old Peter had a personality well suited to the extreme risks of flying with Bomber Command. He had been educated at Brighton Grammar, where his teachers saw him as a daredevil. After being selected as a pilot, he completed elementary flying training with a ‘below average’ ranking. During advanced training in Canada, however, his flying skills improved and he graduated at the head of his class. Having been selected for the RAAF aircrew reserve in mid–1940, he had no qualms about going to war: being Jewish, he had good reason to fight the virulently anti-Semitic Nazis. His former schoolteachers were far from surprised when they learned he was piloting bombers. Peter’s baptism of fire was not far away—and it would come at a time when Bomber Command’s losses were mounting, with an average casualty rate of 4.7 per cent on every raid. Such conditions would challenge any daredevil.
At about the same time that the Lancaster began transforming Bomber Command’s strike power, the navigational aid TR 1335, known as Gee (for Grid), became available. Navigation equipment in RAF bombers had previously consisted of a compass, a sextant, an astro-compass and a few other basic instruments. This made navigation in darkness extremely difficult. Gee was a phase-pulse radio and radar system whose signals appeared as blips on the frosted-glass end of a cathode-ray tube built into the aircraft’s radio. The relative positions of aircraft, target and land stations could now be measured, enabling crews to navigate and bomb ‘blind’. Gee also helped direct return flights to English aerodromes and prevented many of the accidents that had occurred earlier in the war.
The success of Gee emboldened Harris and led to a change in policy. Sixty German cities within Gee range were selected for mass bombing, using 1600–1800 tons of bombs per city. Harris believed that Bomber Command was being woefully under-utilised. He wanted an operation that would use almost all of Bomber Command’s front-line and reserve strength—one thousand aircraft. The target would be a German city, and the raid would be so devastating that Germans would force their leaders to sue for peace. He discussed his ‘Thousand Plan’ with Churchill, who was enthusiastic, and with Air Vice-Marshal Robert Saundby early in May 1942. Saundby, Harris’s deputy, checked the figures and reported that the plan was just about feasible.
Bomber Command then comprised thirty-seven medium and heavy bomber squadrons—sixteen Wellington, six Halifax, six Lancaster, five Stirling, two Manchester and two Hampden. This effectively gave Harris about 400 serviceable bombers—well below his target figure. If raids were suspended for forty-eight hours and unserviceable planes all serviced, the total could be increased to 500. However, if Harris also added Coastal Command’s Whitley, Hudson and Hampden bombers and the bombers that were being replaced with the new Lancaster bombers, he would have near enough to 1000 aircraft.
Churchill wanted Essen, as the heart of Germany’s industrial might, as the target, but Harris wanted Hamburg for its symbolic status. Advice from scientists was that Essen was not a good target, as an industrial haze veiled the city even at night, and this might make aiming difficult. The Operational Research Section advised that Cologne would be the ideal target: it was within flying range and, as a major railway hub, its destruction could seriously damage the movement of goods in that part of Germany. But the weather delayed the plan for a few days.
As Bomber Command squadrons prepared for the big raid, Bill Brill was in action on the night of 29–30 May, in a much smaller op involving just seventy-seven aircraft. His Wellington was one of twenty-seven detailed to bomb the Gnome et Rhône aircraft engine factory and two other industrial sites in the Paris suburb of Genne
villiers. Owing to foul weather over the Channel, Bill flew at an altitude of less than 200 feet until crossing the French coast. The clouds had begun to clear over Paris, and searchlights swept the sky, accompanied by heavy anti-aircraft fire. Most of the bombers released their loads from between 4000 and 8000 feet. Bill, however, dropped to 1500 feet before making his attack. With the bomb-bay doors open, flak struck his Wellington, damaging the hydraulics and rear gun turret and leaving one of the 1000-lb bombs hanging after the others dropped on target.
Returning to England through more bad weather, he spotted an emergency landing ground and brought the crippled aircraft down with the bomb-bay doors still open and one tyre flat. The plane was later scrapped. Bill’s was the only one of four Wellingtons from 460 Squadron to find the target area and successfully attack. For his ‘courage and determination’ in pressing home the assault, he was awarded the DFC on 26 June, the first pilot in 460 Squadron to be decorated.
On 30 May, Peter Isaacson wrote to his family: ‘I’m off on my first operation tonight and not as a second pilot either—but as captain. Don’t know where we are going yet but pretty sure it is over Germany.’ He was right. That day, weather conditions turned for the better. Although Hamburg was under a blanket of cloud, Cologne was not. Harris ordered his Thousand Bomber raid for that night. Writing to his group and station commanders, he made clear his hopes:
At best the result may bring the war to a more or less abrupt conclusion owing to the enemy’s unwillingness to accept the worst that must befall him increasingly as our bomber force and that of the United States of America build up. At worst it must have the most dire moral and material effect on the enemy’s war effort as a whole and force him to withdraw vast forces from his exterior aggressions for his own protection.
