Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  In Berlin, news of the disaster in Dresden quickly spread as Goebbels attempted to capitalise on the consequences of the attack with his grossly inflated death toll. The anti-Nazi journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary: ‘Dresden was a glorious city, and it’s a little hard getting used to the idea that Dresden, too, no longer exists. I almost feel like crying.’

  Breaking German morale had been a contentious issue for Bomber Command since early in the war. In 1941 the British Chief of Air Staff, Charles Portal, justified attacks on civilian sites with the argument that ‘the most vulnerable point in the German nation at war is the morale of her civilian population under air attack, and that until this morale has been broken it will not be possible to launch an army on the mainland with any prospect of success’.

  Sir Winston Churchill—despite his support for the area bombing of cities in eastern Germany, was shaken by the reaction to the bombing—both in Dresden and in Britain. At the start of the war, he had believed that only Bomber Command could ‘provide the means of victory’. Now, the scale of the destruction in Dresden and the huge (falsified) death toll made him question the merits of ‘bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts,’ and call for ‘more precise concentration of military objectives’. Under pressure from the General Staff, who reacted with concern, and an outraged Arthur Harris, Churchill withdrew the memo.

  During the post-war years, Dresden came to represent the unacceptable side of warfare in public consciousness. In the Cold War, East German communists used the fabricated death toll for political propaganda against the West. But in Dresden today, the Stadt Museum offers a frank assessment of Germany’s own part in the destruction of the city. The museum graphically shows the extent of the awful destruction and loss of life that the city suffered. But it does not back away from Dresden’s contribution to the war effort and its role leading up to the night of 13 February 1945. Alongside the photos of bodies piled high and burning in the Altmarkt and of bodies of people who tried in vain to save themselves by climbing into a fire reservoir, there are photos of Hitler addressing a huge rally on the banks of the Elbe in 1944, and of women working in the Sachsenwerk munitions factory, contributing to the war effort. And a video on continuous loop shows the destruction caused by Nazi bombing in Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry and London. The video includes Dresden as part of this process. The message is that no one can claim the moral high ground on this issue.

  The museum’s written commentary accompanying the display ultimately lays the blame for the city’s destruction on the Nazis. While the bombing of Dresden destroyed ‘an outstanding ensemble of European architecture’, it notes, other cities, like Magdeburg, Chemnitz, Pforzheim, Hamburg and Würzburg were similarly destroyed before the end of the war. Moreover,

  The destruction of entire cities had been part of German war strategy since the air raids on the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937. All the same, the propagandistic Nazi claim that the destruction of Dresden had been singular, that Dresden had been an innocent city that was destroyed for no military gain influenced the historical evaluation of events even decades later.

  It is simplistic to say that the bombing of Dresden was morally and militarily unjustified. To the people who were fighting it, the war in February 1945 was anything but over, and the Ardennes offensive two months earlier had made the Allies believe that Germany was rallying. The harshest critics have accused the Allies of being motivated by bloodthirsty revenge for the bombing of London during the Blitz and by anti-German zeal. But the true, dramatically smaller death toll, and recently uncovered information on the role of Dresden in the German military machine make clear that the issue is much more complex. In Dresden, as the Stadt Museum points out, there is recognition of the need to ‘relativise German crimes’ during the war. This, of course, is a clear reference to the Holocaust. Ultimately, while it can be argued that the attack on Dresden was justified militarily, the question of morality will continue to be debated. Nonetheless, the men of Bomber Command have had to wear the blame for the destruction wrought on the city for far too long due to their political leaders distancing themselves from responsibility.

  43

  SHARING BREAD

  Rollo Kingsford-Smith had been trying to get back to flying duties since the start of 1945, when his old station boss at Waddington, Group Captain David Bonham-Carter, phoned to tell him that the commanding officer of 467 Squadron, South Australian Wing Commander Eric Le Page Langlois, was dead. Highly regarded at Waddington, he had been lost on the eighteenth sortie of his second tour, when his Lancaster was shot down while bombing the Dortmund–Ems canal. After a desperate running fight, with a German night fighter, Eric’s aircraft was hit in the bomb bay and burst into flames. He ordered his crew to abandon the bomber. Eric, struggling to maintain control long enough for his comrades to get clear, would have been the last to bail out.

  There were two survivors from the crash, both of whom were taken prisoner by the Germans. One of them, rear gunner Flying Officer Ray Taylor, later said he had been told by a French worker that four other Australians and one Englishman were captured and shot by SS officers near Dortmund. ‘Now this seems to be the fate of my missing crew,’ he said later. (The RAF Missing Research and Enquiry Unit abandoned their investigations into the incident in 1946.)

  Eric Langlois was the second Waddington commanding officer to be lost within ten days. On the night of 21 February, the popular CO of 463 Squadron, twenty-six-year-old Bill Forbes, had led a raid on the Mittelland canal. It was to be the last sortie of his second tour. In the force of 165 Lancasters and twelve Mosquitos detailed to bomb the canal were ten crews from 463 Squadron and another ten from 467. The aim was to breach the canal near Gravenhorst. With the weather clear, the raiders dropped 816 tons of bombs, damaging the canal retaining wall over a length of 500 metres, collapsing a bridge and flooding fields on either side of the canal. Most of the repairs made since the previous strike on 1 January were wrecked.

  But if it was a successful and effective raid, it was also costly for 463 Squadron, which lost three of its ten Lancasters. One of the crews bailed out safely, but the others were not so lucky. Bill Forbes was among the dead. His bomb aimer RAF Flight Lieutenant Bill Grimes, later reported that: ‘The captain gave the order to bail out. I went through the front escape hatch followed by the engineer and navigator. The navigator later said that the captain was still in his seat when he left the plane.’ The bomb aimer was captured five days later.

  With the two Australian units both needing new commanders, David Bonham-Carter offered Rollo the job at 467 Squadron. Rollo accepted, but Australian Headquarters in London had the final say and knocked him back. On 23 March, however, he took a phone call from Kodak House. Would he accept the CO’s job at 627 Squadron RAF, the 5 Group Pathfinder unit and sister squadron to the 617 Dambusters? They flew Mosquitos. Rollo was ecstatic. ‘I said, “It is my dream to fly Mosquitos”.’

  Rollo reported to his new unit in April and began dive-bombing practice almost immediately. As Australians marked Anzac Day 1945, he took to the air for the squadron’s last sortie of the European war. The flight was a long one, to Tonberg, near Oslo in Norway. The raid was to destroy huge fuel tanks just erected at a German submarine refuelling base. Rollo gave himself a marking role, not reckoning on the accuracy of the German Navy’s light anti-aircraft gunners. Previously he had only known low-level anti-aircraft fire. That was not nearly as frightening as what now faced him. As he dived, a gunner opened up on him with tracer fire.

  As I was diving he kept firing, he was as game as hell, and his gun had a bit of scatter fortunately, he was firing right at me and I was dotted right on him. He was firing tracer bullets, I could see these tracer bullets, that don’t fire terribly quickly from a twenty millimetre or forty millimetre gun, pom, pom, pom, I could see these tracer shots going this side and that side and all round me. I thought, ‘I have survived the war to this poi
nt and I am going to survive this.’ He didn’t get me.

  That same Anzac Day, twenty Lancasters of 460 Squadron joined in the attack by 355 aircraft on Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’ chalet and the local SS guard barracks at Berchtesgaden, in the Austrian Alps. The chalet was where the Nazi leader had hosted British leader Neville Chamberlain for the talks that ended in the infamous 1938 Munich Pact, which delivered part of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in return for what Chamberlain naively hoped would be ‘Peace in our time’. Berchtesgaden and the chalet were targets because they were expected to be the centre of final German resistance if the Nazi leadership abandoned Berlin.

  Warrant Officer Neville Johnson, a twenty-one-year-old 460 Squadron rear gunner from Perth, was on his tenth operation. As his father had been at the Gallipoli landing thirty years earlier, the day had always held special significance for his family. Now, he was on a raid striking at the lair of the chief perpetrator of World War II. ‘It was a beautiful sunny day, and as we flew over the Alps, the sun was glistening on the mountains,’ he recalled later. ‘However, over the target, things changed, the flak was fairly moderate, but Harry Payne’s crew, our next door neighbours at Binbrook, were shot down. I saw them going down and reported to our skipper as I could see the chutes billowing out.’

  Harry Payne was known as ‘Lofty’, for good reason—he was 190 cm tall. And right now his troubles were bigger than Neville Johnson realised. His navigator, Col Fraser, later recounted how, as the second wave of 160 bombers circled the target, he had looked out to see puffs of flak. ‘The flak was really pretty light but it was just as the bomb aimer was saying, “bombs gone, bomb doors closed” that we were hit. I can remember an explosion and a piece of flak coming up through the floor, through a bundle of window and out through the roof over my shoulder.’

  As more flak crashed into ‘M for Mike’, two holes appeared beneath the navigator’s seat that Col had left to watch the raid. By that time, Lofty and flight engineer Rick Thorpe were yelling through the intercom that the port engines were on fire. Col watched as Lofty started shutting them down, feathering and altering the pitch. But as smoke suddenly emerged from another engine, Lofty realised the damage was extensive and told his crew, ‘We’re going to have to jump.’ Rick Thorpe wanted to know if that was an order. Col saw that the fuel tank on the wing had ruptured and fuel was washing over the floor. Bomb aimer Dan Lynch, Rick and then Col went out through the nose hatch beneath the bomb aimer’s compartment. Wireless operator Bill Stanley and mid-upper gunner ‘Buck’ Bennett followed.

  Col landed with a solid bump as the ground came up fast, hurting his ankle. Seeing ‘a couple of housewives emerge from farmhouses’, he made for a clump of trees, oblivious to the drama still going on in the crippled Lancaster, where tail gunner Hugh ‘Shorty’ Connochie had caught his ’chute inside the fuselage, causing it to open.

  Shorty arrived at the cockpit fumbling with an armful of useless silk, only to find that the spare parachute that should have been there was missing. Lofty Payne reasoned that he could either jump and leave the tail gunner to his fate or try to glide the burning bomber down from 15,000 feet. He knew his chances of gliding the Lancaster over hilly terrain to a safe crash-landing were slim. He decided on a ‘soft’ landing in a cereal field, only to see power lines. He decided to go under them.

  The plane slid to a halt in the wheat, whereupon Shorty Connochie shouted, ‘You bloody beauty, Lofty!’ A Hitler Youth brigade armed with sub-machine guns quickly surrounded Lofty and Shorty, while the German Home Guard captured Col Fraser and the rest of the crew. Next day—with the exception of Dan Lynch, who was taken away by mountain troops—the Australians who, as Col Fraser put it, had helped ‘knock over’ Hitler’s house were all sent to Stalag Luft VII-A, at Moosburg, not far from Munich.

  Jim Rowland was already there. As Jim later concluded, events leading to that Anzac Day raid on Berchtesgaden had begun a month earlier, when senior Nazi official Martin Bormann proposed a new strategy to Hitler as the pressure from the Allies increased: if the unthinkable happened, then a final stand of the Reich could be made in Bavaria, directed by the Führer and the faithful remnants of his staff from Berchtesgaden. A useful bargaining chip with the Allies would be the lives of officer POWs. Accordingly, all officers of the rank of captain or flight lieutenant and above were to be marched south immediately to be held as hostages in the redoubt. Jim Rowland was among them. ‘We didn’t know it yet, but this was the reason that we left Stalag XIII-D,’ Jim later recalled. They left the prison on 29 March.

  Some days into the trek, Jim managed to break away from the column and, hungry, approached a small Schloss, or manor. He thought he might be able to beg for some bread to keep him going. A woman opened the door, looked at him, screamed and ran. Then he saw an old man leaning on a walking stick. ‘Inkomm,’ he said, ushering Jim into the courtyard, where they sat down. They talked in broken English and German, Jim saying that he was an Australian officer, a POW being marched south. The German said that he had served in World War I and had fought Australian troops in France. He pointed to his artificial leg, and said: ‘English artillery shell 1917.’ Then he said, slowly,

  This Schloss has been in my family for four centuries. But when I am gone, no more. My elder son was killed last year on the Ostfront [Eastern Front], fighting the Russkis. My younger son is a fighter pilot, flying Focke-Wulf 190s against the British Terrorfliegers. Last evening we had news that he had been killed defending the Ruhr. Now I have nobody left. This war was wrong, this war of yours. So was my war. But what can we do, we young ones who do the fighting? We are the ones who pay.

  Calling to his wife, the man asked her to bring beer, and he and Jim sat and drank a glass. Jim thought it was delicious. ‘What could I do or say? I took my leave, giving my deep and very sincere sympathy. And as I left, he said, “I cannot help you, for you are my enemy. But here is a little bread. It is all we can spare.”’

  Jim walked on for a short distance before a young SS soldier marched him back to the bedraggled column. They passed through some of the most beautiful rolling country he had ever seen, with fields of hops and pretty copses of trees, nearly as lush as England. Eventually they came to Stalag VII-A at Moosburg. At the camp they were told to wait until a proper officers’ camp was ready to receive them. There was little more to eat than soup made from potato peel. Over the next weeks, Jim’s weight dropped from eighty-one to sixty-two kilograms. But he soon realised he was lucky. One day, he emerged from a rare cold shower in a large shed and saw ‘a sight that none of us had ever seen or even thought existed. Lined up beside the road by the hundreds were rows of what literally were living skeletons, of a kind that we had never even imagined’. They were inmates from the nearby Dachau concentration camp.

  The sight of these creatures from Dachau, raw bones protruding from elbows and knees, loose and wasted skins draped over bones with no flesh between them, cheeks sunken to the jawbone, so weakened by starvation and cruelty that they could hardly stand, only the glitter of eyes proclaiming their humanity, hit us like a hammer blow, and we could scarcely believe our eyes. And perhaps the worst, the most inhuman thing, was the sickening sweet smell of rot and decay.

  Meanwhile, the American Third Army approached, crushing the SS Division holding Moosburg. Into the camp on 29 April rolled Sherman tanks, followed by Jeeps armed with machine-guns. Jim noticed that one of the Jeeps carried ‘an imposing figure in fatigues, not one but two pearl-handled revolvers in his belt, an American pisspot tin helmet with three stars on his head’. The Senior British Officer, RAF Group Captain Richard Kellett, welcomed the ebullient and impatient General George Patton. ‘The General stuck his thumbs in his gun-belt and said belligerently, “We’ll have all you men outta here in 24 hours.” “We shall be delighted,” said the Group Captain. “Do you know how many of us there are?” “No,” said the General. “About 90,000,” said the Group Captain.’

  Amid the ruins of devastated Europe, the steady colla
pse of the Third Reich brought more and more moments of celebration. Not least among these moments was news of Adolf Hitler’s death on 30 April 1945. Eric Silbert was at Oakington RAF station in Cambridgeshire when he heard the news broadcast about 10 p.m. The mess quickly filled as airmen headed to the bar to celebrate. After a few beers had been put away, an RAF game began in the lobby of the officers’ quarters. Tables were stacked one on top of another, pyramid fashion, before airmen climbed to the top. A bottle of tomato sauce was brought from the dining room and thrown to the top of the pyramid.

  An airman then took his shoes off, sauce was put on the soles of his feet after which he turned himself upside down, was held by a number of airmen on what was now a human pyramid, and he then marched, upside down, across the ceiling. The pyramid was then dismantled, everyone was full of beer and fun and the footmarks were a memorial to the death of Hitler on the two-storey high foyer at the top of the mess at Oakington.

  On 7 May 1945 Rollo Kingsford-Smith noted in his diary: ‘War seems to be over.’ He immediately began thinking about his brother, Peter, and friends such as Alan McCormack, who were in POW camps in Germany. Intelligence information Rollo had access to revealed that the POWs in Stalag Luft III, where he believed his brother and McCormack were, had been marched out of the camp as the Russian forces came closer in late January amid blizzards and temperatures as low as –25°C. Even until the middle of March, temperatures were well below freezing. Having suffered years of poor rations and wearing clothing ill-suited to the appalling winter conditions, Peter Kingsford-Smith and Alan McCormack were not alone among the POWs in being ill-prepared for the evacuation.

  The march had begun in an organised fashion, but amid Germany’s growing chaos, the prisoners took over, and even killed some of their more brutal guards. Rollo’s concern was the brainwashed Hitler Youth, many of whom joined a paramilitary organisation known as the Werewolves. They were hiding in the ruins of devastated cities and continuing the fight as guerrillas. The POWs would be easy pickings for them.