Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  Relationships often began innocently. Flight Lieutenant Mark Edgerley, a tall and slim nineteen-year-old from Adelaide, arrived in coastal Bournemouth in April 1943 and went to the beachside Pavilion with some mates to attend an afternoon tea dance. Seventeen-year-old Londoner Joyce Palmer, whose parents had been killed in the Blitz, was visiting her foster grandmother and decided to go to the dance as a treat. Mark and one of his mates decided to ask Joyce and her foster sister for a dance. Joyce was entranced.

  A group of Aussie airmen came in—we had never seen Aussies in their dark blue uniforms, and the next thing we knew was that two of them came to our table and asked us to dance. I was whirled around by a tall and handsome young man whose name was Mark Edgerley. He asked if I would meet him the next afternoon for the tea dance. Gran said she’d like to meet this young man before she gave permission, so he came out on the bus to meet her, and she agreed I could go with him as he met with her approval.

  Some weeks later, Mark went to London on leave and Joyce showed him the sights. They continued to see each other over the next few months as Mark joined 467 Squadron at Lichfield and Joyce studied physiotherapy.

  John William ‘Jack’ Foran, a wireless operator/air gunner with RAF 550 Squadron, was a farmer from Gilgandra in central western New South Wales. He was deeply tanned, with blue eyes and fair hair that showed his Irish roots. After arriving in England, he met a young Irish WAAF named Dorothy McManus, who was twenty, like Jack. Their backgrounds could not have been more different, for she had grown up in the tenements of Belfast. Jack was soon smitten. It didn’t take him long to nickname her ‘Paddy’—a name she preferred because she didn’t like Dorothy at all.

  They met at a dance at the Stafford borough hall, not far from where she was based. Paddy and a few of the girls had wanted to go but they were short of money, as most of their wages were being sent home. As they waited outside the hall, Paddy ‘looked over at the other side of the bar and there I spied a pair of blue twinkly eyes watching me—blond hair and just gorgeous. I said to the other girls, “I’ll have the one with the blue eyes.” ’ They struck up a conversation, and Jack paid Paddy’s two shillings and sixpence entrance charge. ‘What for I don’t know, he didn’t dance and I certainly couldn’t, and no one would ask me when he was there!’ she recalled. They sat and talked instead.

  Jack moved on to a conversion unit to train on Lancasters, but they stayed in constant contact by mail and phone, and met whenever possible. In August 1944, Jack took time out from flying over Germany to ask Paddy to marry him. ‘How would you like to be Mrs 4 N?’ he asked. Paddy was momentarily surprised: ‘I had no intention of getting married and hadn’t even given it a thought but I did not hesitate to say yes.’ And as for travelling with him to the Outback—‘Australia I never gave a thought to—could have been Austria for all I knew.’ But they still had to get through the war.

  Sergeant Bert Heap, a nuggety twenty-six-year-old RAAF flight sergeant from Brisbane, also had a girlfriend, or a ‘lady friend’, as he described Margaret Kay to his family. In an early letter home, Bert told of spending Easter Monday with Margaret on a bike ride. While the ride had been enjoyable, ‘I would rather like to see a nice beach again,’ he wrote. ‘It is a funny thing, but every time we talk about home, the surf beaches are almost always one of the first items mentioned.’ For the homesick Bert, Margaret Kay provided some solace.

  The already married Rollo Kingsford-Smith watched his mates’ relationships come and go with a certain detachment. One night, two German fighters that were following bombers back to their bases shot up a car whose driver had done his best to conceal the headlights with dim-out hoods. At the wheel was one of Rollo’s RAAF comrades, who was taking his girlfriend across a field to a haystack. The first he knew that he was under fire was the sight of tracer bullets hitting the ground all around him. Then, hearing the roar of the aircraft, he swerved violently and ran his little Austin into a dry ditch. ‘He and his girlfriend were not hurt, but it put them off sex for the night,’ Rollo noted later.

  When Rollo first arrived at RAF Bottesford to join 467 Squadron, he quickly saw that there were many women who did men’s jobs. ‘I’m not saying they were promiscuous, but they looked after us and they loved us and they helped us quite a lot,’ he recalled. But then, after just a few weeks at Bottesford, he met Jane.

  She was a vivacious and petite WAAF sergeant on the station. She was fun to be with and I really enjoyed her company. But my marriage vows were not challenged. It seems that war was better than sex or should I say war was stronger than sex. The fear before combat, then the excitement followed by the exhilaration of striking the enemy and surviving and the long periods in intense stress over enemy territory plus flying fatigue put sex right out of my mind and possibly my ability. In my case the fatigue was worse as I also spent long hours at my Flight Commander’s desk. I had 70–80 aircrew in my flight and many were being killed. This was something I could not easily cope with and found it hard to relax.

  The weight of responsibility soon increased. In mid-November 1943, Rollo learned that Bomber Command was to expand and that a third RAAF Lancaster squadron would be formed. At the age of twenty-four, he was promoted to Commanding Officer of the new 463 Squadron. Jane went with him to RAF Waddington.

  My sense of duty was still very strong at that time—I was a young career officer—and it prevented me from having a relationship with [her]. Maybe if I had been a junior officer with less responsibility I would have sinned, as at that time I genuinely thought it improbable that I would ever see Grace again. But as it happened I came home several years later with a clear conscience.

  Helping to keep Rollo faithful were Grace’s twice-weekly letters, often accompanied by photos of their daughter, Sue. ‘She made me feel closer to my family and less isolated,’ Rollo commented later.

  For Jack Foran’s pilot, the Western Australian Jack Lukies, the problem was a little different. His wife, Marj, was in England, and when he was able to grab some leave from training they toured the country together. On one occasion they stayed at Retford, Nottinghamshire, with an elderly woman who took in guests. ‘Marj and I reckoned she was a police informer, very inquisitive. Probably didn’t believe our marriage certificate, which we always had to show whenever we were together for a night.’ In the circumstances, that was not altogether surprising.

  14

  FAIRLY SHAKEN

  Rollo Kingsford-Smith had a new office, a new staff and new badges of rank sewn on his sleeves by an obliging WAAF. His first day on the job as Commanding Officer of the newly formed 463 Squadron RAAF—25 November 1943—was frantic, but 5 Group was so well organised it all went smoothly. ‘Experienced flight lieutenants from other squadrons in the Group joined us to fill the positions of navigation, bombing and gunnery leaders, and eight or nine Lancasters were handed over to us,’ he recalled. Rollo’s new squadron was formed from C Flight of 467 Squadron, which became his A Flight, and new, untried crews, who formed B Flight.

  The decision to split 467 Squadron had been made as the unit moved to the RAF station at Waddington, close to Lincoln. Waddington had been a permanent base since 1918, and while it had large, solid hangars, they were not adequate for the new Lancasters. Because of this, the planes had to be dispersed permanently around the airfield. Stronger runways also had to be built. But Waddington did have well established engineering and maintenance buildings, a large and, in peacetime, lavish officers’ mess, and comfortable NCOs’ and other-ranks’ messes. Being a permanent station, it had plenty of married quarters.

  The Australians arrived to find the station run by a handful of older officers who worked leisurely office hours and had the best mess all to themselves. Overnight, their tranquil lifestyle was wrecked by crowds of boisterous airmen who, because they were flying around the clock, wanted meals at the most ridiculous hours. What clearly made it worse for the RAF officers, Rollo concluded, was that most of the interlopers were brash and forthright colonials! Thin
gs quickly came to a head.

  The old chaps thought because they had been there first they had priority to the best chairs, especially those close to the fireplace, so important in the winter, and to the best table in the dining room. I remember on our second night there when a group of aircrew came into the mess at about eight p.m. tired and thirsty and cold after flying all day and the old men would not give up their chairs drawn up around the fire. One of our young men went outside for a minute or two, came back, stood in front of them all, and displayed in his hand a handful of live .303 rounds. All he said was, ‘Look! Live bullets!’ then tossed them into the fire. There was a mad scramble and all the chairs were empty. Unworldly people think that a live round thrown into a fire will explode violently and the bullet whiz out as from the barrel of a gun. All I have ever seen, and on many occasions, is that the brass cartridge case splits down the side, the gas comes out with a little ‘phhhhhht’ and some ash flies up for about thirty centimetres. Nevertheless it was effective. It did not take long after that before the real workers assumed their rightful place in what was to be their home, maybe for the remainder of their short lives.

  The same afternoon that he took over the squadron, Rollo learned that 5 Group was to fly that night—including 463 Squadron. About twelve hours after its formation, the squadron put seven operational aircraft on the line, crewed and ready to fly to Berlin. ‘Fortunately for the crews and I suppose unfortunately for the record book, the operation was cancelled due to weather. But it was a magnificent Australian/English effort achieved only by superhuman effort and determination,’ Rollo said.

  Despite the reprieve, Berlin—the dreaded ‘Big City’ to Bomber Command crews—now beckoned. Rollo and 463 Squadron would play their part in the second, and most intense, phase of the Battle of Berlin, between mid-November 1943 and late-March 1944, the first phase having been fought between late August and mid-October 1943.

  Bomber Command’s Sir Arthur Harris had postponed this fight in 1942 for lack of sufficient aircraft and navigation systems sophisticated enough to tackle the most heavily defended target in Europe. By 1943, with Lancasters available in large numbers, Harris was finally in a position to put his belief in area bombing to the test. When he knew he could deploy more than 800 long-range bombers on any given night, he judged the time right to launch the attacks.

  After the disaster of Hamburg, Berliners were expecting similarly devastating raids. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, who was part of an informal Berlin resistance group made up of journalists, doctors, and other professionals, noted in her diary on 8 August that citizens had been warned by leaflets and loudspeaker announcements to evacuate the capital:

  ‘Men and women of Berlin,’ a hoarse voice rattles out. ‘The enemy is ruthlessly continuing his aerial terror against the German civilian population. It is urgently desired, and is in the interest of every individual who is not obligated for professional or other reasons to stay in Berlin—women, children, pensioners, and those who have retired from active life—that such persons move to regions less subject to air attack.’

  The German capital was beyond the range of the most reliable navigational system, the radio-based Oboe network. Instead, crews relied on on-board H2S ground-scanning radar, which, without a strong geographic feature such as a body of water, provided only a limited indication of the target area. The confusion of woodlands, lakes and smaller towns surrounding the city only added to the difficulty of picking out targets.

  On the night of 23 August, when the bombers first struck, Bomber Command lost fifty-six aircraft—eight per cent of the bomber stream and the heaviest loss of the war so far. The toll was grim testimony to the effectiveness of German countermeasures, notably Wilde Sau (wild boar) night fighters, which overcame the radar-fooling clouds of Window by patrolling above expected target areas and waiting for the bombers to come. Meanwhile, Zahme Sau (tame boar) night fighters used the ‘Window-proof’ SN2 radar system to scour the skies for bombers on the way to or from their targets, forcing them to take longer, more complex and thus more vulnerable routes. The Germans also developed flares that the fighters released above the bomber stream to illuminate the planes for defenders. So bright were they that some airmen claimed they could read newspapers by them.

  The Allied bombers struck again on the nights of 31 August, 3 September, 8 October and 17 October. The battle began in earnest a month later. Between mid-November 1943 and late-March 1944, there were sixteen massed attacks. The standard weapons were a 4000-lb high-explosive bomb known as a ‘cookie’, which looked like an over-sized petrol drum, and 1000 nine-pound incendiaries. These were prone to drift, so they often caused damage well away from the target area.

  While ‘Bomber’ Harris was now confident he had the strike power to hit Berlin, the approach of winter meant the crews would soon be flying in worsening conditions. When the second phase of the Battle of Berlin began on the night of 18 November 1943, 440 Lancasters, aided by four de Havilland Mosquitos to mark the target, headed to Berlin only to find the city under cloud. While only nine Lancasters, or two per cent of the bomber fleet, were lost, the damage inflicted was not severe.

  The next major Berlin raid came on the night of 22 November 1943, when 769 aircraft flew—the greatest force sent to Berlin so far. It was the RAF’s most effective attack on the capital, with a loss rate of just 3.4 per cent of the bomber force. Residential areas west of the city centre suffered extensive damage. In the dry weather, several firestorms ignited and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was destroyed. (To this day the ruined church stands on the Kurfürstendamm as a monument to the horrors of war.) Many other important buildings, including Charlottenburg Palace, the Berlin Zoo, the Ministry of Munitions, the Waffen SS Administrative College, the barracks of the Imperial Guard at Spandau, and several arms factories, were either badly damaged or destroyed. An estimated 2000 people were killed, including 500 in a large shelter which received a direct hit. Among the dead were Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels’s mother and mother-in-law. Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘I just can’t understand how the English are able to do so much damage to the Reich capital in one air raid. The picture that greeted my eyes in Wilhelmsplatz was one of utter devastation. Blazing fires everywhere. Hell itself seems to have broken loose over us.’

  Hans-Georg von Studnitz, who held a senior post in the German Foreign Office Press and Information Section in Berlin throughout the war, noted in his diary that the raid ‘seemed like the end of the world’, and that the city had ‘become one vast heap of rubble’. In one bizarre side-effect of the attack, a tiger that had escaped from the zoo was said to have made its way to the Cafe Josty, gobbled up a pastry and promptly fallen down dead. The cafe’s owner sued for libel after a fellow Berliner drew uncomplimentary conclusions about the quality of Josty’s baking. A court-ordered post-mortem determined, much to Josty’s satisfaction, that the tiger had died from glass splinters found in its stomach. Rumour had it that escaped crocodiles were seen on the banks of the Landwehr Canal. Although nearly all the major hotels had been wrecked, the premier hotel of the Third Reich, the Adlon, survived relatively intact, but it had no heating and could muster up only cold cuts and potato salad.

  The next night, 23 November, 383 aircraft attacked Berlin again, destroying more than 2000 houses and killing around 1500 people. Twenty Lancasters—5.2 per cent of the force—were lost. Three nights later, 26 November, 443 Lancasters and seven Mosquitos set out for Berlin. Among the Lancaster men flying that night was twenty-one-year-old Dick Peck, of 467 Squadron. Dick came from Narara, near Gosford on the New South Wales central coast, and had enlisted in the RAAF in May 1941. A wireless operator, he was on his first op.

  Above Frankfurt, Dick’s crewmate and mid-upper gunner, Owen Jones, reported a fighter on their starboard side, which both he and rear gunner Vern Jeffrey proceeded to watch. They were relying on Aural Monica, a radar device fitted in the tail of the bomber, to warn with a series of pips if any other aircraft approached from below o
r behind. But German night fighters were equipped with a new receiver known as Flensburg which homed in on Monica emissions. The fighters could ‘see’ Monica-equipped aircraft before Monica was able to ‘see’ them. The next thing Dick saw was a great burst of cannon fire ripping past the aircraft on the starboard side, which forced his pilot, Len Ainsworth, into a violent dive to port. The burst came from a second plane that the gunners had not seen or had any warning of.

  The Aural Monica never even let out one peep so wasn’t of any use, it did pip again later when nothing was there which caused the pilot to corkscrew for nothing, so we finally switched it off as being totally unreliable. When the fighter attacked we were at approximately 20,000 feet. On pulling out of the port dive we found we were at 12,000 feet, also the starboard wing was making groaning noises and there was a strong smell of petrol in my position. I reported this to the pilot and asked that he take it easy with his corkscrewing as the noise was most pronounced during this procedure.

  They continued on to Berlin, climbing as they went, but could only make 17,000 feet. Reaching the target, they bombed at that height. Dick’s curiosity then got the better of him.

  I decided to have a look out of the astro-[navigation] dome as the rest of the crew were saying what a terrible sight. It was awesome. After my first glance I quite agreed with them. All I could see was a wall which appeared solid of bursting flak, searchlights, smoke, marker flares, bursting bombs and fires. I thought if we get through this we’ll be lucky. We flew on, did our bomb run, dropped the bombs and turned for home with nothing further happening to us.