July ended with another trip to Germany, mostly ineffective, although Canadian P/O Earl Hale, now with two weeks’ experience, had an exciting time being chased by two fighters, Me109 and He113 according to the ORB, for 35 minutes, starting five miles north of Amsterdam. The pursuit was mostly at wave-top level after Hale dived from 6,000 feet. WOp/AG Sgt Alf Boland claimed the Messerschmitt, shot down into the sea as it turned away from an attack; the other fighter appeared to run out of ammunition and give up.
That Hale was chased cannot be doubted; that one of the chasers was the He113 is impossible, because such an aircraft did not exist. For reasons that are not apparent, unless it was purely for propaganda, the Germans took many photographs of a failed Heinkel design of a single-seater and portrayed it as the new super-fighter that was equipping the Luftwaffe in large numbers. The British certainly believed this, publishing aircraft identification charts and never doubting its mention in combat reports, as here with 82 Squadron, but never wondering why – despite all the claims by RAF fighter pilots in 1940 to have shot one down – no example of this machine was ever found.
So, Hale was chased by two Me109s but he got away, which was all that mattered, and he landed at Watton with no undercarriage in a machine full of holes. With cloud cover lacking, most of the rest of the twelve bombed secondary targets along the coast while one pilot flew right into the heart of the Ruhr and beyond. Unable to spot his industrial target, Wingco Lart bombed Paderborn aerodrome instead.
Hardly surprisingly, Lart’s persistence and example-setting had been noticed at HQ. He had flown more ops – and very dangerous ones too – in a single month than most squadron COs might be expected to fly in a year. The Air Officer Commanding 2 Group, Air Commodore James Robb, put the wingco’s name forward for the DSO – Distinguished Service Order, at this time only awarded to those already mentioned in despatches, and to officers only, usually fairly senior officers (major in the army, squadron leader in the air force and above), unless it was for a truly exceptional act of bravery that, for some reason, didn’t quite merit the Victoria Cross. Lart’s citation stated: ‘By his courage, devotion to duty and skill as a pilot he has set an inspiring example which has more than maintained the excellent esprit de corps of all ranks under his command.’
The award was not made public for some time, so Gus Beeby in the turret and F/Sgt Robertson in the observer’s office could not have known that their skipper had been recommended for the second-top gong, and we can only speculate whether they might have occasionally wished for a little less of the inspiring example and a bit more of the turning back.
During that month of July in 2 Group, an average of one Blenheim a day failed to return, plus three that did return but would never fly again. Of the 93 missing crew, 58 were dead. It was against this background that Edward Lart, the allegedly chilly and ruthless commander, more than maintained the fighting spirit of his squadron.
With the Battle of Britain now raging, Hurricanes and Spitfires in a desperate struggle, pilots flying several ops a day, the question was – to what use could 82 Squadron’s fighting spirit be put? Blenheims couldn’t fly as defensive fighters. They’d have had no chance. No, the only thing they could do that would help in this last-ditch attempt to repel a German invasion was to bomb the Luftwaffe on the ground. The Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Portal, ordered more attacks on enemy airfields; forget about Germany for the moment, but don’t press home the attacks without fighter escorts and/or cloud cover.
There were no fighters to spare for escorting jobs, and if there was no cloud then 2 Group could not contribute a penn’orth of damage to the enemy. One idea was to try high-level bombing instead, 20,000 feet, of the kind later practised at night by 500 Lancasters at a time, each carrying ten times a Blenheim load. There were several reasons why this was unlikely to work.
The aircraft, the Blenheim, was not a good flyer at that height. The much more nimble German fighters would have an even greater advantage than normal, so close formation flying would be even more important, and more difficult. Secondly, there was no bombsight that could be expected to work accurately at 20,000 feet so a crew had very little chance of hitting the target with their one thousand pounds of bombs.
Thirdly, there was Freya. Although individual sorties did little damage, at least they were not likely to cause great concern at the German radar stations, the effectiveness of which was still not fully appreciated by the British. Large formations flying high would be spotted in plenty of time to organise a hostile reception.
Nevertheless, 82 Squadron was ordered to train in these new tactics and spent the first five days of August doing so. John Bristow: ‘We were told we had to do a high-level bombing raid so, for a few days, we went up to 20,000 feet, which in those days was considered very high, and got used to wearing our oxygen masks.’
This training was interrupted on the 6th by an orthodox attack on aerodromes, when twelve of the thirteen turned back, including Bristow with his new pilot, newcomer flight commander Sq/Ldr Norman Jones. One did not turn back, bombing the Luftwaffe base at Boulogne and, when he got home, Lart again had to order his ground crew to repair some damage he’d done to his machine by going in so low. England and the wing commander expected every man to do his duty, but there didn’t seem to be so many who would ignore the cloud-cover orders.
Maybe things would be better the next day, when twelve of the same crews who had set off yesterday were to try out the new high-level style of raid. The target was the aerodrome at Haamstede, on an island between Vlissingen (Flushing) and Rotterdam. They flew in two boxes of six, one led by Jones with Bristow in the turret, one by Lart. When they got there, they found so much cloud cover that they couldn’t see a thing from 20,000 feet and came home without bombing, except for P/O Wellings who had a go on his own. If he did any damage it is not recorded.
This would not have been classed as a real trial of the idea. It just so happened that it would have been a much better day for the normal kind of raid they’d been doing, and maybe they could have bombed Haamstede from low level without having to turn back. If high-level raids were to be tested as a way of getting better results with less risk, another target would have to be found and another day assigned and, as 82 Squadron was doing all this training, they would be the obvious outfit for the job.
Meanwhile there was another standard op, nine went to airfields, six came back early, one hit Cherbourg, one hit Guernsey (the undefended islands of Jersey and Guernsey had been occupied 30 June/1 July) and one failed to return.
That was on the 10th. We don’t know exactly when British Intelligence concluded that many aircraft, bombers and troop carriers were massing at Ålborg in Denmark, ready for the invasion of Britain, but the orders came in to Wing Commander Lart on the afternoon of the 12th. He was to mount a high-level raid on Tuesday the 13th, irrespective of cloud cover and from 20,000 feet, ‘if possible’. The attack was to be pressed home at all costs.
In fact, the German bombers were being collected for Adler Tag, Eagle Day, also the 13th, when the Luftwaffe was to launch a great offensive against RAF airfields. In any case, regardless of why there were scores of Ju88s there, Ålborg aerodrome would be very well defended.
Ålborg, an ancient trading port on the Limfjord but by this time a major industrial centre and the third city of Denmark, opened its new airport in May 1938. When German paratroopers landed there on the evening of 9 April, the intention was to make it a forward base for the Luftwaffe as an aid to conquering Norway and a refuelling facility on Germany–Norway–Germany flights. Being designed only for use by small civilian aircraft on intra-Scandinavian business, it was nowhere near adequate for the Germans. However, the site was excellent, and all that was in the way were a couple of hundred farms and homesteads and a manor house.
By 26 July, every obstruction had been demolished and three concrete runways built, largely with Danish forced labour. When those large numbers of aircraft began to assemble there,
to add to the interest already focused on the place by British Intelligence due to the refuelling activity, Ålborg became a high priority.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AT ALL COSTS, IF POSSIBLE
All the paradoxes and contradictions in such a raid would have been obvious to a man like Lart. The idea of flying at 20,000 feet was to put his men and machines out of danger from the flak, which it might to a certain extent, but the threat from fighters would be increased because of the Blenheim’s sluggish performance at that height. There was virtually no possibility of bombing accurately from there, and even the slightest hope of hitting the target would depend on crews being able to see clearly, so cloud that might hide them from the enemy would also prevent them from doing their job. Sunny skies would mean them being spotted in plenty of time for a hot reception to be prepared, and they had no escorts to give them a fighting chance.
There was no instruction about turning back on this one. They were to press on regardless of cloud cover. The proviso about bombing from 20,000 feet ‘if possible’ only took Lart back to the beginning again. What would make it possible? Clear skies. What would clear skies do? Make them sitting ducks. John Bristow:
We were called to the briefing room and told we were going to bomb Ålborg, in Jutland, where there was a lot of German aircraft and a fighter base. We were also told that the flight there was 450 miles, so that made Ålborg a little bit past the loaded Blenheim’s range so we probably wouldn’t get back to Watton. We were to make for an airfield in Scotland or anywhere we could. Whatever we did, we were told ‘Don’t use Boost Nine, because if you use Boost Nine you will not have enough petrol to get back to anywhere.’
My first thought was that we’ll force-land in Sweden and have a week’s holiday. Most of the rest thought this was a silly mission, to bomb a place where we already knew the fighters were there.
There was indeed a fighter base but, according to the latest information, it was temporarily unoccupied. Gefreiter (Corporal) Heinrich Brunsmann, a pilot with 5 Staffel of Jagdgeschwader 77 (Luftwaffe approximate equivalent to a squadron of a fighter group) had an intriguing theory about why the RAF decided to attempt the Ålborg raid on the day they did:
Quite near to the Ålborg fighter base [Rørdal aerodrome, also known as Ålborg Ost] was a cement factory that in peacetime was owned by a British company. Not known at the time but later discovered, certain workers at the factory were acting as agents for British Intelligence, transmitting information about the comings and goings at the several aerodromes. On the morning of 12 August, 1 Staffel of our group left the Ålborg base and so it would have appeared to the agents to be ungarrisoned, and this would have been reported by radio immediately. Somehow, the same agents failed to notice our arrival (5 Staffel) in the evening, so when the English squadron attacked Ålborg next day, nobody would have reckoned with there being a German fighter squadron ready to defend it.
If Corporal Brunsmann is right, either that information never reached 2 Group or, if it did, it was withheld from Wing Commander Lart. If it was in fact passed on, he chose not to include it in his briefing. The latter case is surely impossible to believe, and it cannot have been reasonable for Group not to relay such encouraging news, so we are left with the most likely explanation. The agents’ information, false anyway, if it was ever transmitted, got stuck somewhere and 82 Squadron went on their operation believing the truth: that there were fighters waiting for them.
Whatever their individual feelings, it was the belief at least of The Times Aeronautical Correspondent that here were men with a mission. That was the phrase he used, under the headline ‘Changed outlook of RAF pilots and gunners’, and the change he put down to aircrew seeing the indiscriminate slaughter of refugees and other civilians, and of shipwrecked sailors, by the Luftwaffe. Of course, 82 Squadron had seen plenty of attacks on refugees in France and Belgium and we can be sure that such sights hardened hearts, but we can doubt if the boys would have recognised themselves in this description:
In the early months, flying for these young men in blue was a gay adventure; it was, to use a popular RAF expression, ‘grand fun’. Now all this has changed. From being daring young adventurers of the air they have become Men With A Mission, men who feel a personal responsibility to destroy that threatening machine which is the Luftwaffe. Gone are the young men who flew for the thrill it gave them, and in their place are the cold-eyed, determined pilots and air gunners bent upon the destruction of their foe.
Cold-eyed or no, take-off was scheduled for 08.40. The load was the usual four 250lb high-explosive bombs plus eight small fragmentation bombs, which were 25lb of explosive and shrapnel that worked as anti-personnel mines and, hopefully, might rip a few holes in parked aircraft.
There were delays. One was caused by the accidental opening of a parachute, when Ronald Ellen’s observer Sgt John Dance, in his hurry to get aboard, snagged the metal ring that does the job. Parachute training in Bomber Command consisted of showing you how to put the pack on, and what to pull once you were clear of the aircraft. There were no practice jumps. Every airman’s first experience of a jump was the one he made to escape from doom, and so every airman climbed into his machine hoping, maybe believing, that he wouldn’t need this inconvenient parcel he had to lug around. Sgt Dance said something to the effect of having to manage without one. F/Lt R A G ‘Nellie’ Ellen told him to go and get another, sharpish.
The clerk was opening the day’s mail and found something from HQ that was of fateful importance. P/O Don Wellings, Sgt Don McFarlane and Sgt Peter Eames were posted elsewhere and so their place on the op was taken by the crew on stand-by, George Oliver and Alf Boland skippered by Earl Hale. And so off they went, twelve aircraft and crews, bound for Jutland. Sergeant John Oates in UX/L was Lart’s port wingman.
John Oates left school at 14, as so many did then, for a job as office boy on twelve shillings a week. After two years, he and his sister took on a milk round turning over £23 a week. That was in 1925 and by 1940 John had a sizeable dairy retail business and had moved into making butter and cream.
Meanwhile he had learned to fly, at Hamble near Southampton, and later joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve through the Doncaster Aero Club, near his home. When the war began, he trained as a fighter pilot and, despite (or because of) being classed as above average, was transferred to two engines and the Blenheim, much to his disgust. Posted to 18 Squadron, lately back from France as an army Air Component, he was transferred to 82 and flew his first op with them 2 July, the one on which his flight commander, Sq/Ldr Chester, failed to return. Oates: ‘At this early stage of the war, we flew single intruder flights in daylight and were briefed to turn back if there was no cloud cover. I became an expert at gentle landings with bombs still attached.’
Today there was no turning back.
‘We crossed the North Sea at 5,000 feet flying just above ten tenths cloud, but that cleared before the Danish coast. We divided into our two flights as we neared the target.’ Bill Magrath:
‘As I always did, I ate all my chocolate ration before take-off, not wishing to waste any of it in the event of being shot down. We were to set course for the western mouth of the Limfjorden and follow that up to the target. It was a fine day at Watton, but there was thick cloud over the sea. We went up to 8,000 feet when we reached the Danish coast and split up into our flights. My crew was in B Flight, which was Sq/ Ldr Wardell’s.’
The formation was four sections of three in vic (an inverted V made of one in front and two behind and to either side, stepped down). Lart was in the lead, with Oates and Wigley port and starboard wingmen behind, then came Sq/Ldr Jones leading his section of Ellen and Newland. B Flight had Rusty Wardell in front, with Baron and Hale wingmen, then F/Lt Syms leading Blair (observer Magrath) and Parfitt. Magrath:
‘We saw the cloud was disappearing as we reached the coast, and that our leader’s navigator had made a mistake. We were some way south of where we should have been, coming in at Ringkøbing.’
Elsewhere it has been suggested that there was no mistake and the wingco had decided on a different, more direct route, to save fuel, rather than go up to the fjord mouth. Looking at the map of Denmark, we can see that there is a difference in the two flight paths. Making landfall at Ringkøbing, the distance across the sea might have been slightly less but there remained around 110 miles to go across Jutland, giving the Germans – once messages had been received and understood – half an hour to prepare their reception. From the fjord mouth at Thyborøn to Ålborg is about 70 miles, giving the enemy less time but, surely, still an ample amount.
It has also been said that the mistake was due to the inexperience of the observer/navigator, twenty-two-year-old Pilot Officer Maurice Gillingham, who replaced the long serving Flight Sergeant Robertson in Lart’s crew because the wingco preferred having an officer. It is certainly true that Gillingham had had only one previous op with 82 Squadron, the abortive high-altitude raid on Haamstede, when he flew with Lart while Robertson went with Nellie Ellen. However, there were other officer observers on the squadron and, if Lart had been minded that way, he would surely have picked one of them before this point. He had flown with Robertson all through July, which was three flights into Germany and six into occupied countries, which suggests that the wing commander was more than satisfied with the flight sergeant’s navigating. Indeed, there were two officer observers in other aircraft on the Ålborg op. More probable is that Robertson was due some leave and Lart felt that, having taken the novitiate to Haamstede, he should stick with young Gillingham rather than find a more experienced sergeant.
He was also sticking with the same machine. This was the fourth in a row flying T1934 UX/R, which is curious because there was no culture of ‘my’ aircraft in the squadron, unlike some squadrons flying Wellingtons or Hampdens, for instance, where crews who lasted long enough became attached to one particular aircraft. In later days, when the larger Lancaster and Halifax crews formed a kind of affection for ‘their’ aircraft, they often renamed it and added a nose painting, ‘Willing Winnie’ or ‘Lonesome Lola’. In 82 Squadron, crews were randomly assigned to aircraft and never did the several consecutive ops in Z-Zebra or S-Sugar that would have been necessary to build up some sort of possessive feeling.
The Squadron That Died Twice Page 10
