Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  The 467 Squadron pilot Dan Conway was also struck by cultural differences between the Australian and American air forces. He adhered to the RAAF and RAF view that the skills of the navigator were crucial for a bomber crew flying at night. ‘It has to be said that USAAF navigators were notorious for their lax procedures,’ he said. Dan recalled the day when a C-46 USAAF transport landed at RAF Stoney Cross, Hampshire.

  Some of us wandered over to inspect one of the latest transport planes with two decks for cargo. With typical hospitality we were invited on board. Whilst the wireless ops drooled over gleaming radio equipment I noted the comic book spread open on the operator’s desk. Our crew listened in disbelief as we were told the pilot and navigator had gone over to Flying Control to find out where they were. On that clear day, with unlimited visibility, all they had to do was follow the coastline eastwards to the vicinity of Brighton where they would sight the smoke of London, their destination, to the north. We were astounded at their casual approach.

  The Australians embraced the RAF’s way of doing things, both on the ground and in the air. Eric Silbert heard a fair bit of criticism of the performance of the USAAF over ‘stout and Yank’ sessions: ‘On doing Pathfinder work we frequently went on raids that the United States Air Force had been on in the morning. They had not been successful so we had to go back in the evening. On one occasion we went to a raid on Chemnitz. The Americans had missed Chemnitz by eighty miles and had bombed Prague, not even in the same country.’

  The American heavy bombers favoured pattern bombing, flying in formation during the day with a maximum bomb load of 4000 pounds per aircraft. This contrasted with the British policy before D-Day of night raids on which each crew was independent and the Lancaster and Halifax carried up to 14,000 pounds of bombs. According to Eric, these were the details that upset British personnel when discussing Americans. He noted that the USAAF had severe losses from Luftwaffe attacking their formations and causing confusion if the lead aircraft was shot down.

  Another topic of perennial interest was the number of Luftwaffe aircraft shot down. Eric believed that if he had tabulated what the Americans said, they would have shot down every German aircraft in existence in any six-month period. In Bomber Command it was different. If an enemy aircraft was claimed as shot down it had to be verified from aircraft logs. ‘If it wasn’t verified it was only a “possible”. Our American friends didn’t have this system so there could be any number of crews claiming the “chop”.’

  On the question of discipline, Eric was also far from complimentary. ‘The American colonel in his office would have his feet on the desk, cap on the back of his head, cigar hanging out of the corner of his mouth, tie undone. We always felt strongly that sloppy manners made sloppy leaders. The RAF officers conformed to our idea.’ Allies they may have been, but the disparities between the Australian and American air forces were marked. That is not to say that there were not differences with the RAF, too—as one English flight engineer found when he joined 460 Squadron. He was initiated into his Australian crew by being soaked under a shower while in full uniform. The Australians held the erroneous view that Englishmen did not wash. After the joshing they got on famously.

  On leave and with his new eagle, Jim Rowland headed for London to meet his mate, Scott MacPhillamy, who was also on leave from his Halifax squadron in Yorkshire. They had not seen each other since they had started operations and, as ever, Scott was in an irrepressible mood. They spent much of their leave in the company of Scott’s aunt, Una Brown, and cousin, Bimba. Una, an artist, was from an old bush family in Australia, and was married to an Englishman. Bimba was a talented ballet dancer who had been invited to study and dance at La Scala, in Milan, before the war. Through Bimba, Scott had met two pretty dancers who had become good friends. When Scott and Jim were in London, they would get them tickets to their show, Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years. Afterwards, they would visit nightclubs like the Coconut Grove in Regent Street, which had a good orchestra and stayed open until around 3 a.m. Jim found the girls great company: ‘it was almost like being back at home and taking someone out to Prince’s in Sydney.’ So vibrant was the theatre and nightclub scene that Jim thought the owners ‘must be minting money’. ‘You can’t get in if you’re in the wrong uniform, which includes all shades of blue, these being considered less flush with the coin than some of the brown ones. In short, it’s a racket, just as it is in Sydney, or any other place.’

  There was never a dearth of old school or university friends in London. Jim’s six-day leaves passed quickly in exchanges of news from home and some memorable pub crawls, mostly in the area between The Strand and Fleet Street. On one leave, Jim ran into an old friend nicknamed ‘Blondie’ who was, entertaining a batch of sprogs like himself in a pub. Having recently finished a tour on Wellingtons, Blondie was an instructor now, and the sprogs were all ears as he joked about a night raid on Düsseldorf.

  We were on the bombing run, and all hell was going on down below, the great bursting light bubbles as cookies from the Lancasters exploded mingling with the strings of fire from incendiaries and smoke and flame from the fires already burning. All of a sudden, right in front of the windscreen, up came a huge lump of concrete. On the concrete was a lathe, and working at the lathe was a German. What was I to do? Instinctively I closed the throttles, and of course the undercarriage horn blew. The German heard it, thought it was knock-off time, and stepped off the edge of the concrete. And that was how I got my first German.

  Soho and Piccadilly were full of prostitutes, who did a brisk trade with the American servicemen who swarmed round the bars and nightclubs. One of Jim’s mates christened them ‘night fighters’. ‘Corkscrew port, GO! Night fighter on the port quarter!’ he would joke, or, after one of the crew had been on leave, ‘Did the night fighters get you?’

  Una Brown had a reputation as a clairvoyant and read people’s palms. One evening, she agreed to look at her nephew Scott’s hand, but immediately turned away without a word. The others present quickly changed the subject. Not long after, on Sunday, 13 August 1944, Scott and his crew went missing over the Netherlands. His navigator, Irishman Nigel Beamish, survived. By some miracle, he was grabbed and hidden by members of the Dutch Resistance within a few minutes of his parachute landing. Spirited away through Belgium and France to Spain, he was back in England within three weeks. Nigel recounted how they had been caught on their way home by a night fighter that came up under the aircraft and filled it with 23mm cannon fire. He said that Scott had tried hard to get his crew out but had had no chance himself. A shaken Jim tried to console Una and Bimba. They tried to keep things as normal as possible but once or twice Jim thought he saw Una glancing at him in a strange way. He thought nothing of it. ‘She said that she had seen Scott’s end very clearly the last time she looked in his hand on our previous leave, and described just the way it must have been in the burning aircraft, though she had no way of knowing what it would really be like,’ Jim recalled. He thought that what she had seen had proved to be ‘uncannily accurate’.

  On the night of 5 October 1944, after a raid on the industrial and transport centre of Saarbrücken and a brief nap, Jim and his crew set out on their eighteenth operation, a daylight raid on an oil refinery at Scholven, in the Ruhr valley. They ran into heavy flak, and Jeff Jefferson, the mid-upper gunner, was hit by a large piece of shell that tore away a chunk of his lower leg and left his booted foot hanging by his Achilles tendon. Jim sent two of his crew back to do what they could to help him while he set about getting home as quickly as possible on three engines. Another piece of shrapnel smashed through the instrument panel in front of him, cutting a neat furrow in his leather flying helmet as it continued out through the canopy. Jim felt as if he had been ‘walloped over the head with a cricket bat’. On return, Jeff was taken straight to hospital, where he stayed for several months while surgeons tried to reconstruct his leg.

  On leave again in London, Jim met a young woman named Jeannie Pilgrim at the
Coconut Grove. They dined and danced and shared bottles of ‘that poisonous scented West Australian Lanoma gin’ from the Australian Comforts Fund. They also had packets of fifty ‘awful Cape to Cairo’ cigarettes. In wartime London, however, one had to make do. Good gin, whisky and cigarettes were extremely hard to get, and prices were extortionate.

  At about 3 a.m., Jim hailed a cab to take Jeannie home. As they drove through the blacked-out streets, the driver remarked that the V-1 ‘buzz bombs’ had been active all day. As they turned into Jeannie’s street, Jim saw a blinding flash at the end of it, followed by an enormous bang. Jeannie knew immediately what had happened, and urged the driver to hurry. As they got closer they saw that it was not her building that had been hit but one diagonally opposite that was being used as a children’s hospital. A buzz bomb carrying 1000 pounds of high explosive had blown off the building’s façade, and beds were teetering on the edge of shattered floors. Jeannie ran in to her building to see that her family was all right, while Jim joined the police, ambulance and wardens who were just arriving. ‘The poor wretched little kids were screaming in terror, with dazed nurses doing what they could to reassure them and drag the beds back from the brink. I set about helping the rescuers to dig kids out of the rubble. I worked the rest of the morning doing this, and by the end of it my best blue uniform wasn’t worth a bumper.’

  About midday Jim realised he had to catch his train or be Absent Without Leave. On the journey, he reflected in horror that there must have been many German streets in which the situation was far worse than in the one he had just left. He reasoned that even though it was difficult to drop bombs with perfect accuracy, at least Bomber Command tried to hit specific targets. ‘Though we tried not to be indiscriminate, we also were impersonal—war in the air is impersonal: it is kill or be killed, and is lived on a plane completely separate and divorced from the scenes on the ground,’ he observed. Then Jim thought of Lionel Wheble and all the other airmen who had been lost, ‘dripping down the sky in a shroud of flaming petrol, and of my gunner Jeff in the hospital in Ely, very probably without a foot for the rest of his life, and I couldn’t make sense of any of it.’

  Phil Martin was a lanky larrikin who had grown up on a farm in Western Australia. Aircraft crazy, he joined the RAAF at eighteen and soon showed himself to be a bit of a dasher.

  Phil first joined No. 61 Squadron RAF in January 1944, and after successfully completing thirty operations, was invited to join the Dambusters in 617 Squadron RAF. The decision was not just his to make. ‘It was a volunteer squadron,’ Phil emphasised later, ‘and the decision to join had to be made by the whole crew. They had to agree, otherwise I would have turned it down. But to a man they all said yes, let’s do it!’

  Phil led an efficient and well-disciplined crew. At Woodhall Spa they held the high-level and low-level bombing records during the entire time they were there. Don Day, Phil’s RAF bomb aimer, who later migrated to Australia and bought a house a few kilometres from his wartime skipper’s, said this was only possible with a top navigator who could provide timely information on wind speed and direction. It was also critical to know the height of the target above sea level so that the correct drift angle could be set on the bombsight.

  To do all of this, your pilot must fly absolutely spot on, and that’s very, very difficult. A jink or a lurch of the aircraft could throw the bomb off by up to 300 feet or more. We had a bit of a pact on our aircraft—no smoking, and no idle chatter. Phil had a system where every half hour he would call up every member of the crew and ask how they were going, and what was going on. Cutting out all unnecessary talk paid off for us on at least two occasions.

  Twenty-year-old George Lovatt, from Sydney, was the crew’s wireless operator.

  Under Phil’s leadership we had developed the utmost confidence in each other and, I believe, [developed] into a reasonably effective unit. Phil was a caring captain and would not hesitate to stand up for any member of his crew when required. His ability as a pilot was undoubted, and he was superbly backed up by our navigator and bomb aimer in getting to and bombing our targets as shown in excellent photographic records taken over the targets by our camera. The engineer nursed our engines as if they were his own, and the gunners never failed to give Phil sufficient notice to take evasive action when necessary.

  In early October 1944, Phil and his crew began practising for their most hazardous operation to date—an attack on the heavily defended Kembs dam, ten kilometres north-west of the Swiss city of Basel. American commanders feared that the Germans, in a desperate bid to halt rapidly advancing US ground forces, might dynamite the dam floodgates and drown the assault troops as they crossed the Rhine or separate the infantry vanguard from the main task force with the surging water. To pre-empt this, the Allies would blow the gates themselves. Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Cochrane ruled out a bouncing-bomb raid like that on the Ruhr dams the previous year. He decided that the logical bomb to use was Barnes Wallis’ new Tallboy, dropped with pinpoint accuracy in a daylight raid against the upstream side of the floodgates.

  On 7 October 1944, Phil took the controls of one of thirteen 617 Squadron Lancasters. His aircraft and five others carried Tallboy bombs that were to be dropped from 600 feet. The other planes would bomb from high altitude in hopes of diverting the defenders’ fire. They flew into what Flying Officer Bob Barry, the Western Australian rear gunner in Australian pilot Jack Sayers’ crew, later described as ‘the most frightening barrage of light and medium flak that we have ever seen during the war’.

  In Phil Martin’s aircraft, bomb aimer Don Day was finding it impossible to get a good sight. The aircraft was jinking about violently in the turbulence from the Lancaster in front of them—piloted by the RAF’s Kit Howard—and the flak bursts around them. Realising he could not drop the bomb with any degree of accuracy, Don reluctantly cried out, ‘Go around again!’ Phil immediately pulled out and banked hard to starboard to prepare for a second run. At the same time, Kit Howard called over the radio transmitter that he too would make another run, and his aircraft also veered off to starboard.

  As Kit prepared to come in again, Phil said, ‘Hold it, Kit—I’ll go in with you!’ The crews of the aircraft circling above watched in anguished silence as the two Lancasters hurtled low over the chopped-up water into the teeth of a ferocious anti-aircraft barrage.

  Kit Howard’s starboard wing burst into flames and sheared off the fuselage. Seeing the hit, Phil Martin’s rear gunner, Tommy Trebilcock, opened up his guns and gave the defenders ‘everything I had. I can remember seeing the tracer bullets going into the defences with men running about,’ he said. As Kit’s Lancaster crashed and exploded, Don Day saw one of the escorting Mustangs appear at forty-five degrees to their course, firing towards the ground and passing under them. Don Day is convinced that the Mustang pilot’s intervention saved their lives that night by distracting the gunners on the ground. A moment later he released the bomb.

  My last glimpse of the target gave me the impression that the bomb was aimed slightly left of centre—Phil’s attacking speed was higher than our planned attack. The bomb may thus have gone over the top of the sluice gates. I just do not know for sure.

  But their Lancaster had been hit.

  We were out of control doing a wide turn to starboard. Phil was using his engine to control turns as the rudders were damaged. In a few seconds we were weaving through a balloon barrage; I remember our mid-upper gunner Harold Mayoh shouting, ‘Balloons! Can I have a go at them, Skip?’ and Phil saying, ‘No—they’re Swiss!’ There was a good deal of tracer flying about—I don’t think the Swiss were really trying to hit us—then we were roaring across a whole lot of red roofs with people everywhere staring up at us.

  Over the target Tommy Trebilcock had heard an explosion and the fuselage shuddered violently. The rudder controls had been smashed and the Lancaster had begun turning to starboard. Phil skilfully avoided danger while his flight engineer, Jack Blagbrough, assessed the damage. Jack went to the r
ear of the plane and found where flak had cut the rudder wire. Grabbing the fire axe, he wrapped the rudder wire around it and told Phil over the intercom what he had done. ‘He would tell me port or starboard and I did what I could till we got away from the target,’ Jack said later.

  Soon after, the delayed-action bomb dropped by 617 Commander Willie Tait exploded, ripping the western flood gate apart. Water began pouring through the breach and flooding the area. The raid had achieved its goal—but at a high price. Two of the six planes carrying Tallboys had been destroyed and all their crew members killed.

  Nor was the trip back without incident, as Jack Sayers recalled.

  On the way home low down we saw some German soldiers on bicycles, so I let the gunners loose on them, including Ernie Weaver in the front turret. We did get down fairly low when we did this. We also flew around the war memorial at Villers-Bretonneux to the delight of some French farm workers, who had obviously spotted the kangaroo motif on our Lancaster. After we’d arrived back and were inspecting the aircraft, I remember Vic Johnson coming up to me with a small tree branch he’d found jammed somewhere, and saying, ‘I think this is yours!’

  When Phil Martin returned to Woodhall Spa, more than 100 holes were counted in the Lancaster. He was awarded an immediate DFC, which was processed in advance of the DFC he was awarded at 61 Squadron (and which was not promulgated until May 1945).

  35

  DOUBLE SCOTCH, THANKS

  Alick Roberts was chuffed. He had arrived at RAF Spilsby station to be welcomed into 44 Squadron RAF with the assurance that he was now part of ‘5 Group, the Precision Bombers’. ‘The inference was that it was somewhat of an honour,’ he said. Crews for 5 Group, he was told, were selected on the basis of their bombing results during training.