Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  His first operation, on 1 November 1944, was a raid on the Meerbeck oil plant in Homburg, in central Germany. Alick was a bomb aimer on the raid, which involved 226 Lancasters and two Mosquitos from 5 Group, and fourteen Mosquitos from 8 Group. ‘As a daylight [raid] it was very likely a good introduction to operations as we could see clearly all that went on and we gained a good idea of what would be happening around us at night,’ Alick said.

  His crew was a new one, so they were well towards the end of the small stream and were well placed to observe the start of the action. Somewhere near the Dutch border, the crew of another bomber accidently left their radio transmitter on and broadcast their conversation.

  ‘Where are we now nav?’

  ‘Just about to cross the Dutch border.’

  ‘What’s the name of the place we’re going to?

  ‘Homburg.’

  ‘What’s the target again?’

  ‘Oh, some sort of an oil plant.’

  At this point the flak that from a distance had seemed to be scattered around Homburg became more concentrated. Alick thought the enemy must be listening.

  ‘What’s the bombing height?’

  ‘22,500 feet.’

  The flak now became heavily concentrated from about 22,000 to 24,000 feet. The enemy was obviously listening.

  ‘Jeez! we’ve been hit!’

  ‘Any damage?’

  With damage confirmed, the skipper of this careless crew then called each man on the aircraft in turn, starting with the rear gunner, to check if they were OK. The navigator revealed that he had been wounded in the buttocks but was quite all right to carry on. Alick noted that he had a pronounced Australian accent. ‘I think every crew complained about [this crew] at debriefing. They would not have been hard to identify: a somewhat damaged aircraft and an Australian navigator with a sore tail.’

  Before the raid was over, Alick witnessed another incident he would never forget. An aircraft flying ahead of and a little below his own was hit. He heard no explosion and saw no smoke, and concluded that the round must have penetrated the fuselage and exploded inside it.

  The Lancaster seemed to lurch, and at once the undercarriage and flaps lowered quickly, almost as if they had just ‘dropped’. Immediately it started a wide descending turn through 180 degrees back towards home and having completed that started to dump fuel. The fuel spread the length of the aircraft’s mainplanes and trailed to the point of evaporation like two gossamer veils in the shape of a huge butterfly’s wings.

  Alick did not see any bombs jettisoned, but he guessed the pilot must have let them go. The Lancaster’s rate of descent, although seemingly controlled, was so rapid that he doubted it could have flown any great distance.

  With undercarriage and flaps down, drag would have caused a high fuel consumption, and they were dumping fuel. For a successful emergency landing they would have needed to retract undercarriage at least. From the way the wheels and flaps lowered it seemed to me that the hydraulic system must have been damaged. Perhaps the pilot was hoping to get rid of all fuel before coming to earth. I could not follow it more than briefly as the time arrived for me to start my preparations for the bombing run. It was a beautiful but tragic sight.

  Having witnessed the death throes of a Lancaster that might just as easily have been his own, Alick was relieved to complete his bombing run and return uneventfully to base. ‘For the first time our crew experienced the euphoria of a return from a completed operation.’ More successful ops followed, to Düsseldorf on the night of 2 November, and to the Dortmund–Ems canal two nights later.

  Eddie Ward, the 467 Squadron navigator, was also on the Dortmund– Ems canal raid. With barges transporting war materials along its length, the canal was an important link in Germany’s internal transport system. The canal included a pair of earthen aqueducts that conducted it over a river. Destroying these artificial banks would flood the surrounding areas, halt barge traffic, and disrupt local transport and agriculture. Given its importance, the canal was heavily defended by both anti-aircraft guns and German night fighter squadrons.

  The raid on the canal in Lancaster ‘L for Love’ was Eddie’s twenty-fifth op. He and the rest of his crew were naturally eager to finish their final five and complete their tour. The 174 Lancasters and two Mosquitos, all from 5 Group, crossed the English Channel in loose formation. On reaching the Dutch coast, the Lancasters changed course and estimated times of arrival over specific points in Germany were checked. Everything went relatively smoothly until, with Eddie’s Lancaster about fifteen minutes from the target, a Focke-Wulf 190 night fighter attacked without warning from below and directly ahead. The fighter spat out a stream of tracer bullets and high-explosive ammunition. Pilot Stan George immediately put the Lancaster into a corkscrew manoeuvre and managed to lose the enemy plane.

  But not without damage. The exhaust shield on the ‘L for Love’s’ port inner engine had been knocked off, causing the engine’s exhaust flame to extend about four metres behind the wing. This would make the Lancaster an easy target for enemy night fighters and anti-aircraft gunners. Other damage caused the plane to fly erratically, but Stan was able to steady it by using the trimming tabs.

  When Stan George asked if the crew were all right, Dave Beattie, the bomb aimer, from Atherton in Queensland, and Cliff Byfield, the Perth-born mid-upper gunner, failed to answer. Stan asked Eddie to check on Dave and told wireless operator Pat White to check on Cliff. Cliff was fine, having simply lost his connection to the aircraft’s internal communications system. But when Eddie went down into the nose of the Lancaster, he found Dave bleeding badly and slumped over the bomb sight, which had been set to drop the fourteen 1000-pounders in the bomb bay. ‘He was out to it in a pretty bad way, unconscious,’ Eddie recalled. ‘He had been hit in the face—his eyes were lying loose on both cheeks.’

  He and Pat lifted and dragged Dave to the centre of the aircraft, where there was an emergency folding bed, blankets and essential medical supplies, including morphine. As they carried him, Dave began to regain consciousness and started struggling, his bloodied hand thumping down on a map lying on Eddie’s navigator’s desk. While Pat gave an injection of morphine for the first time in his life, Dave stammered, ‘I’ve got to drop my bombs.’ His two crewmates had to wrestle him to the bed before he began to calm down as the morphine took effect. The bullet that hit him had entered his head below his left eye and exited above his right eye. Eddie told the pilot that he and Pat doubted he would survive the flight back to base.

  Amid this drama, Stan ordered the engineer, Ted Stokes, to give him final minor course corrections to bring the aircraft over the aiming point marked by Pathfinder flares. He told Ted to take over Dave’s job and drop the bombs. As the bomb-bay doors opened and the weapons fell, the automatic camera captured the explosions. They had breached the aqueduct’s banks.

  Without warning, another night fighter attacked. Although Stan managed to shake it off, the Lancaster suffered more damage. Eddie Ward looked at his watch and noted that less than fifteen minutes had separated the two fighter attacks. ‘However, it seemed to be about five to six hours and we could not believe our respective watches!’ Setting a return course for the English Channel, Stan realised that one engine was overheating and not operating properly. He feathered it for fifteen minutes after leaving the target area to conserve power. Several holes were now visible in the wings. Then, without warning, a third night fighter attacked from the rear and above. Tail-gunner Jim Cox, from Perth, sighted the enemy aircraft about 1000 metres out and opened up with his four 0.50 mm Browning machine-guns. Stan immediately put the Lancaster into an evasive weave and shook off the German fighter.

  Then, as they neared the Dutch coast, a second engine failed. They limped across the Channel on the remaining two engines. Stan headed for Woodbridge aerodrome, in Norfolk, but without radio he had no means of communicating this plan to the base. On the ground, British anti-aircraft gunners spotted the flame from the engine and
opened fire, thinking the Lancaster was an enemy buzz bomb. The opening shots struck the aircraft, causing violent gyrations. Eddie fired a fusillade from a Very pistol to indicate the colours of the day and that it was a RAF plane, but it seemed to take forever for them to become visible from the ground. Eventually, however, the ground gunners saw the shots and stopped firing.

  Stan landed the Lancaster safely and an ambulance rushed Dave to hospital as the rest of the crew drew breath. One of the RAF ground staff boasted that the anti-aircraft gunners on the coast had been ‘red hot’ that day, bringing down half a dozen buzz bombs and German aircraft that had followed returning RAF bombers back to England. The Germans would infiltrate with the aircraft over the coast and attack them as they landed. The staff at Woodbridge ‘asked us what we wanted to drink. I had a double scotch,’ Eddie said.

  On the morning of 5 November 1944, Eddie’s crew, minus the critically ill Dave Beattie, returned to Waddington. ‘L for Love’ was holed in more than seventy places. Having landed with only two pints of hydraulic oil remaining in the undercarriage, it was classified as unserviceable and grounded for immediate repairs. The crew completed their remaining five operations in another Lancaster, using spare bomb aimers attached to 467 Squadron. Those ops were performed in a ‘much more restrained and apprehensive atmosphere’ than the previous twenty-five, Eddie recalled. ‘I think everyone was affected by Dave’s absence and his continuing fight for life.’ Dave Beattie survived, but he remained in hospital for several months.

  The raid left the Dortmund–Ems canal unusable, with the water level so low that barges were stranded in the mud. The impact on German arms manufacturing was dramatic. A week after the attack, Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote to Hitler that the bombing of the canal had prevented smelting coke mined in the Ruhr valley from reaching three major steelworks.

  Following their traumatic flight, Stan George was awarded a DFC, Eddie Ward, Dave Beattie and Ted Stokes were all awarded the DFM, and Pat White was Mentioned in Dispatches. Dave retained marginal sight in one eye for a couple of years before going completely blind.

  36

  THE BEAST

  Bruce Buckham, a twenty-six-year-old pilot from Goulburn, New South Wales, had just celebrated his third year in the RAAF when he and his Melbourne wireless operator, John Holden, set out in a Lancaster on an operation they knew was special. Bruce had been a clerk with BHP when he enlisted in the RAAF in November 1941, only to be told he was too old to fly. But his talent as a pilot was soon recognised, and he was assigned to 463 Squadron.

  It was 12 November 1944, and Bruce was piloting Lancaster ‘Whoa Bessie’, to the Tromsø Fjord, at the northern tip of Norway. It was hoped this would be the culmination of an operation that had started two months earlier and failed twice. Bruce’s target was a battleship that was the pride of the German navy—the Tirpitz. The 251-metre-long floating fortress was newer and bigger than her sister Bismarck, which had been sunk in 1941. Built along similiarly sleek lines, the Tirpitz could reach thirty knots and was armed with the same formidable weaponry, including eight 38cm, twelve 15cm and sixteen 10.5cm guns. Completed in February 1941, with an armour-plated deck up to 120 mm thick and the main belt of the hull 320 mm thick, the Tirpitz represented a formidable threat to Allied convoys in the Atlantic. Though this threat had yet to be fully realised owing to a series of mishaps, the Allies were determined that the battleship Churchill called ‘the beast’ must be destroyed. Over four years the Tirpitz was the target of more than forty attacks. All failed. By 1944 the ship had been moved to northern Norway, out of range of RAF bombers operating from British airfields. Carrier-borne Fleet Air Arm aircraft made several daring attacks while Tirpitz was anchored in Kaa Fjord, at the northern tip of Norway, but did not manage to inflict fatal damage.

  In September 1944, an ambitious plan was devised for a force of Bomber Command Lancasters to strike the ship from airfields on Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Willie Tait, commanding officer of the Dambuster 617 Squadron RAF, was appointed to lead the force. In the previous three months, his squadron had repeatedly demonstrated the devastating effect of the Tallboy bomb, and it was decided that this was the weapon most likely to sink the Tirpitz.

  As well as carrying several 400–500 pound ‘Johnny Walker’ mines on his Lancaster designed for use against ships in shallow water, Bruce Buckham’s orders were to record the results of the raid, which would involve twenty-seven bombers from 617 and 9 Squadron. Intelligence reports had Tirpitz still in Kaa Fjord, protected by submarine and torpedo nets. On 15 September, the RAF Lancasters took off for the fjord from a forward base at Yagodnik, in Russia. As they approached the battleship, smoke generators on the surrounding cliffs were activated to blind the attackers. ‘Whoa Bessie’s’ bombs were dropped without effect, but Willie Tait’s bomb aimer sighted the ship before it was fully obscured. He released the Tallboy, which spiralled towards the Tirpitz at supersonic speed, smashing into the bow.

  A reconnaissance aircraft later confirmed a ‘big hole in forward deck’. Badly damaged and unable to steam at more than eight knots, Tirpitz could not hope to safely flee back to Germany for repairs. The Germans decided to relocate the ship in Tromsø Fjord, in shallow water where it could not sink, and use it as kind of floating fortress to help ward off an expected invasion of Norway. But the Germans miscalculated: the location brought the battleship 300 kilometres closer and within the range of Lancasters operating from RAF Lossiemouth, in the north of Scotland. Another attack by 617 and 9 Squadrons was consequentially scheduled.

  More powerful Merlin 24 engines were installed in the Lancasters, the mid-upper gunners’ turrets and the pilots’ armour plating were removed, and additional fuel tanks were fitted. On 29 October, Willie Tait led thirty-eight of these modified Lancasters on a second attack. For most crews it was a relatively uneventful night flight, but that was not the case for Jack Sayers, the twenty-three-old from Brisbane who had completed his first tour with 467 Squadron before joining 617 Squadron. He and the other pilots had flown individually through the black northern night and were scheduled to rendezvous just before dawn. To the east, daylight struggled eerily through the darkness.

  Jack Sayer’s rear gunner, Bob Barry, was on high alert, as they had been warned of two fighter squadrons stationed not far from the target. Secrecy was imperative: as soon as the enemy learned of their presence, its purpose would be obvious. Suddenly, Jack had to make a quick decision:

  peering into the lighter part of the sky to the east, I jolted upright and prepared to fire. From just forward of the starboard beam and flying on an exact reciprocal course was a lumbering old JU-52, tiredly staggering its way southward towards Germany, those within probably eagerly anticipating their coming leave and certainly not expecting to see enemy aircraft heading towards the North Pole!

  We were not spotted. If we had been, none of us would have come back to Lossiemouth that night. The fighters would have made sure of that. That is why I did not fire at a target which looked close enough to reach out and touch.

  Where man-made smoke had obscured the ship on the first raid, this time nature provided a layer of thin stratocumulus cloud, which swept in to cover Tromsø just as the raiding aircraft flew in. As it happened, Jack’s fellow Australian pilot, Phil Martin, was the only one to get a momentary clear run on the Tirpitz and drop his Tallboy. One near miss was later recorded—probably Phil’s. The other Lancasters returned with their bombs, causing Bruce Buckham to conclude that the battleship ‘seemed to be leading a charmed life’.

  Willie Tait and his crews were ordered to make a final effort to destroy the Tirpitz before the Arctic winter set in. On the night of 12 November, thirty-two Lancasters took off for Tromsø on Operation CATECHISM. Along with Bruce Buckham and Jack Sayers, four other Australian 617 Squadron pilots took part in the operation: Arthur Kell, Bunny Lee, Ian Ross and Phil Martin. Flying with Arthur was his larrikin South Australian bomb aimer, Keith ‘Aspro’ Astbury. They too
k off after midnight amid some apprehension over the conditions. Jack Sayers thought it was ‘a bit frightening because there was still some heavy sleet and slime around, and I remember as I took off I was skidding a bit, scudding on the runway with a fierce crosswind’. Eventually twenty-nine overloaded aircraft took off, each Lancaster carrying seven tons of fuel and a 12,000-pound Tallboy.

  Bruce Buckham, again flying 463 Squadron’s ‘Whoa Bessie’ to film the operation, recalled that 13 November dawned perfectly clear and still, with snow-covered Tromsø a magnificent sight. As they climbed high and swooped from the back of the fjord, they saw the Tirpitz facing towards them. This time there were no smoke generators and no enemy aircraft to intercept them, which was just as well. Lumbering along at some two tons overweight, the Lancasters would have been easy pickings for the fighters.

  As they came in at 14,000 feet, the Tirpitz began firing her 38cm main guns. Closer in, Buckham saw sporadic anti-aircraft fire break out from guns lining the fjord and then from two flak ships.

  We went in at 6800 feet as Willie Tait and the others lined up to do their individual bombing runs, but this was too unhealthy so we descended to about 2000 feet and isolated the guns lining the fjord. One of the flak ships became somewhat pestiferous so we shot her up a bit and she disappeared up to the end of the fjord, the other kept a respectable distance. The bombers were right overhead now, doing a perfect bombing run, bomb-doors gaped open, the glistening Tallboy wing suspended. Now they were released. To us they appeared to travel in ever so graceful a curve like a high diver, heading with deadly accuracy towards one point, right amidships of Tirpitz.

  Arthur Kell saw his bomb fall in the centre of a pall of smoke and claimed a hit or a near miss; Ian Ross reported that his Tallboy fell on or close to the bows; and both Jack Sayers and Bunny Lee saw their bombs disappear into the smoke. (Phil Martin had to return to base after a fire in his hydraulic system.) Several other bombs landed within the anti-torpedo barrier, causing significant cratering of the seabed. It was later revealed that this removed much of the sandbank that had been built to prevent the Tirpitz from capsizing. While one bomb penetrated the ship’s deck between two of its turrets and failed to explode, a second hit amidships between the aircraft catapult and the funnel and caused severe damage.