By the time they reached the coast, Sgt Norman Baron had broken radio silence to tell Lart that his gauges were showing low fuel. Perhaps the gauges were faulty; more likely there really was something wrong in the fuel system. In any case, he informed the wingco that, as was proper procedure, he was turning back and Lart could not order him to stay.
There was a Freya radar station on that coast, which could not estimate the flying height of invaders but could tell distance and direction, and which had often been in work in previous weeks when Bomber Command was raiding at night. Reports from this newfangled and temperamental machine had been questioned before, when its signals indicated attackers in broad, cloudless daylight. Why would the Tommies come on a beautiful summer’s day like this? Were they mad, or suicidal?
As those Tommies crossed into Denmark, they were also spotted the old-fashioned way, by the watchers at the Søndervig lookout post. So, there was plenty of information to suggest that the English bombers must be going for Ålborg; there were no other worthwhile targets, no other enemy installations that could justify the risk of a raid in bright sunshine. John Bristow: ‘The wing commander was obviously hoping that the cloud cover would stretch all the way to Ålborg but directly we hit the coast, at the wrong place, well down south, the clouds went. The wingco decided to carry on, and he had the authority so we had to carry on too, a hundred miles across enemy-occupied Denmark without a cloud in the sky.’
Ålborg aerodrome was very important to the Germans. Eagle Day would be the beginning of the end for Britain. It was intended that the Ju88 bombers would have fighter escorts to make sure they did what was required, but the fighters stationed at the subsidiary field, Ålborg Ost, arrived from Norway the evening before, had defence of the main aerodrome as their primary task. When word came through that the British bombers were on their way, the eight fighters of 5 Staffel/Jagdgeschwader 77 were scrambled, to climb to attack height and wait.
The normal strength of a staffel was twelve, made up of pairs called Rotte, (pack, as in hounds) each fielding a Rottenführer and a Katschmarek (wingman). While stooging about waiting for their prey, the eight available Me109s of 5 Staffel would have been flying in their pairs, a couple of hundred yards apart. In a dogfight with Spitfires or Hurricanes, the wingman was expected to prevent the enemy getting on his leader’s tail, as well as looking after himself, a case of quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who shall guard the guardians?) if ever there was one. There was also the tactical option of the Schwarm (flock, flight), two Rotten in a flat, stepped-back formation led by the most experienced and capable pilot rather than the most senior in rank.
As the Blenheims were without fighter escort, these German pilots might not have been expecting to have to resort to tactics.
Whatever Lart thought about their chances of survival, he knew very well that their only chance of inflicting serious damage on the enemy was to go in low. From 20,000 feet ‘if possible’, even if they’d had the petrol to get there, there was no hope of hitting the target except by pure luck. From 8,000 feet, where they now were, hopes were obviously better but still slim. So, he began a steady descent to 3,000 feet, followed by the rest of A Flight.
Rusty Wardell did something similar, except he led his five of B Flight, minus Baron, a little way off to starboard, planning to come at the drome from a different direction, thus to give the anti-aircraft gunners something else to think about.
As at Gembloux, the German defenders’ stratagem was straight-forward. Put up a flak barrage, scatter the Tommies, and let the fighters pick off the survivors. The difference here was the Ålborg flak establishment, permanent rather than mobile, was highly professional and thoroughly drilled, well set up to guard the approaches to the city and, more importantly, the airfield to the north-east, beyond the city, over the waters of the fjord.
A Flight still had six miles or so to the target when the flak opened up. No major hurts were suffered as they pressed on, the outlying gunners seemingly not yet finding their range quite accurately enough. Well, they would make sure they were in better order when the next lot of Englanders tried their luck. Meanwhile, A Flight reached the aerodrome where more flak and the fighters awaited them.
In the turret of Blenheim T1889 UX/L was Sergeant Tom Graham, who had crewed with Oates since they came to the squadron in late June. They’d had six ops together, two of them solo weather reccos and four cloudless turns-back lasting a couple of hours at most. Oates had done one more op with a different WOp/AG but that had been a turn-back too. Their usual observer, the experienced Sgt Hutcherson, who had come onto squadron back in May, after Gembloux, had been transferred, making room for Thim Biden, which made three who had never seen the enemy. Sergeant John Oates, pilot:
Flying at number two in A Flight I saw nothing of the action but could hear plenty, then a few seconds after bombing we were hit by flak in the turret and knocked over. As we fell I realised the machine could still fly so I let it fall to near the ground. Thim [P/O Biden, observer, flying with Oates for the first time] thought we were going to crash and was getting ready to bale out. Our intercom was u/s after the turret was hit so all I could do was reach down to tap him with my foot and hope he understood my signal. As soon as we levelled out we were hit by the fighters, and with no intercom I was getting no news about where they were from gunner or observer. All we could do was fly on as close to the ground as we could.
Oates had dropped his bombs somewhere on the airfield, as had the others of A Flight, but what made the difference in their fates was that Oates’s enforced solo low flying allowed him to escape the further attentions of the fighters, while the other five, reassembling in their formation behind their leader, to the German eye looked the easier and potentially more fruitful option.
Although the damage to the aerodrome was not great and would soon be repaired, the crews of A Flight did manage to hit the target with some bombs bang in the middle, and that despite immense pressure from ground fire. Oates’s machine was the only one badly damaged but all of A Flight took hits from the airfield guns.
For a brief moment, the men of A Flight were free and speeding north-west.
Now there was a new objective for the German flak gunners. B Flight arrived in close formation, five Blenheims together making a textbook target. This time, the outlying flak batteries made no mistake.
The first hits on Doug Parfitt’s Blenheim, T1933 UX/C, flying starboard wingman to F/Lt Syms, were bad enough but not sufficient to bring him down. He jettisoned his bombs to give himself more of a chance, and they fell in a field killing some cattle, while he faced a rather difficult choice. One, try to stay in formation and go through more flak, two, abandon ship, three, turn away and run, knowing that there were bound to be fighters about. There were eight 109s in the air; two pairs had gone after A Flight while the others hung around to see what leftovers there might be from the anti-aircraft barrage.
For Parfitt, such considerations became irrelevant very quickly. The third choice – to flee – was not really an option anyway, and we can speculate that he had come to Decision Two and given the order to jump seconds before a direct hit on the tail blew the whole of that section off. Only the observer, Les Youngs, had been able to get out before, we conclude, simply because it is hard to see how he could have done that from a tail-less aircraft plunging to the ground at terrific speed.
Certainly the other two men were trapped, and poor Les Youngs could not profit from his early release, as his chute didn’t open and he was killed just the same. A local man, carpenter E A Madsen, saw the fall and went to investigate. He was deeply moved to find the body and sat there a while, noticing the name on the unopened parachute pack. Mr Madsen would have been even more affected had he known that this had been twenty-one-year-old Leslie Youngs’s first operation – as indeed it had been for WOp/AG Ken Neaverson, killed in the crash, and only his third for the skipper, likewise dead.
And then there were four Bs, still with some way to go to the target: Warde
ll and Hale up front, Syms and Blair following. Parfitt’s section leader, F/Lt T E Syms in R3800 UX/Z took a hit that turned his aircraft right over. Syms was a regular from before the war but a very recent arrival at 82 Squadron, flying four ops since late July, none of which had resulted in contact with the enemy. He was more than making up for it now, and wasted no time in telling his crew to get out and did so himself. Sergeant K H Wright did likewise, and for a moment it seemed that his jump would be in vain as he dropped through a burst of machine gun bullets, he thought aimed at him. While parachuting airmen, obviously trained for war operations, were generally considered fair game, in that shooting them would prevent them reappearing on another occasion, it must be unlikely that a fighter pilot in the midst of the battle would have had the time or inclination to fire at one man when there were several nice fat Tommy aircraft left to knock down. We must conclude that Sergeant Wright happened to be in the way of more important business.
In any case, he was unharmed and landed fairly gently in the shallow water of the Limfjord shore, close to where his skipper had recently been met by courteous German soldiers who helped him limp to the beach with a broken ankle. Wright, like his skipper, was not asked to make it to the shore alone. The WOp/AG, Sergeant Edward Turner, age twenty, was in the aircraft when it crashed, perhaps dead already, more likely wounded by the flak or unable to escape for some other reason. Flight Sergeant Bill Magrath was the observer in R2772 UX/T:
We were hit by the flak on our bombing run and the port engine was on fire. We got shot of our bombs only to find we were under attack from fighters. I got down on the floor of the nose-blister and fired the under-gun, which was a Browning machine gun that nobody expected to do any good, but at least it was a contribution, and my reward was a bullet in the leg from a Messerschmitt. We were full of holes from the flak and the fighters were adding more. It didn’t look like we could stay in the air much longer.
Pilot Sergeant Don Blair thought so too, and attempted a crash-landing-cum-ditching in the fjord, close to the shore of Egholm island. This might have been a good plan but an explosion in one wing dropped them suddenly, at a point where the shallow water covered large and sharp rocks. The aircraft was wrecked completely and all its crew suffered bad injuries. Magrath, hip and a shoulder broken and blinded in one eye, lay semi-conscious. Greenwood, who had fared slightly better than the others but still had an ankle shot through and broken in three places, saw his captain in such a bloody mess that he thought he must be dead.
Danes who had watched the catastrophic end of R2772 waded out expecting to find three bodies and instead had the problem of moving men alive who clearly were in no state to be moved. While some prepared the nearest thing they had to an ambulance, a bed of loose straw on a farm cart, others carried the airmen to this relatively luxurious transport. From there they would be driven slowly and gently across the island to the quay used by the Ålborg ferry, and thence to the German-occupied hospital in the city.
The stand-by crew, the last minute replacements, were led by Earl Hale. The Canadian had escaped from two Me109s when he last encountered fighters but he could see no possibility of getting out of his current fix. Although damaged by flak he had pressed on and reached the target, to meet fire from gunners below and fighters above that was surely too much for any aircraft.
It was certainly too much for R3821 UX/N. Although right on the spot and, as it were, with an open goal, no bombs fell from UX/N. Perhaps, having got this far, they thought they might as well try and hit the biggest building they could see, which was the station HQ.
Whatever came first, the death of the pilot or the shooting away of the last bit of flying ability from the aircraft, R3821 smashed into the airfield with all bombs aboard and exploded, digging a crater 15 feet deep and more. Nobody watching could have imagined even the slightest possibility of a man surviving such a complete disintegration.
Hale had been sticking close to his leader, B Flight commander Rusty Wardell, who had dropped his bombs and somehow run through the hot metal curtain that had downed his wingman. The fate of R3829 was not long postponed, because Wardell was carrying with him the fire started by the flak shells back at the aerodrome. Soon the cockpit was ablaze and the pilot was being burned alive. He called his order to jump and, despite the pain of his seared face and hands, got out himself. One crewman was unable to move, dead or wounded. One did make the attempt but by then he was too near the ground. He tried to deploy the chute anyway, the cords and silk became tangled around the aircraft’s tail and he was dragged down.
The resulting explosion was so great that there was no immediate prospect of telling which of the charred bodies had been in the machine and which one had been tied to it, and the evidence was lost.
Flight Sergeant George Moore, observer, was a thirty-year-old regular from pre-war days, a married man. He and WOp/ AG Tom Girvan, nineteen years old, had been Wardell’s crew since the squadron leader had joined the squadron in late June as a flight lieutenant.
So, that was the whole of B Flight gone, with nine men dead and six more very lucky not to be. The fighters closed in on the five aircraft of A Flight. Sgt John Bristow was Sq/Ldr Norman Jones’s observer in Blenheim T1827 UX/H, section leader behind Lart:
‘We’d had the flak all around us and we’d taken a lot of shrapnel. We’d dropped our bombs and tried to run, then the fighters closed in. I saw my best friend Beeby go down in flames, who was with the wing commander.’ (Bristow is mistaken in this; he saw somebody go down but Lart, Gillingham and Beeby had a way to go yet.)
Sgt Oates being out of the reckoning on his hedge-hop to safety, the Me109 pilots naturally picked on the tail-enders first, and Newland in R3904 UX/K was lagging. Flak damage was slowing him down and, like the weakest animal in the herd, the lions picked him out.
Benjy Newland did not have his usual crew. His regular WOp/AG, Sgt Herbert Doughty, was on leave, and Sgt Turner had been with this skipper only once before Ålborg, a solo venture to Gelsenkirchen spoiled by the weather, with afterthought bombing of a Dutch aerodrome.
Bullets riddled the machine. One went through Newland’s shoulder. More wounded or killed his crewmen, Ken Turner in the turret and George Ankers up front. There was very little possibility in a crippled Blenheim of any crew member helping another who was disabled. Newlands could do nothing for his men, except give the order to jump and struggle himself, one-handed, with his cockpit canopy.
His parachute landed him near the little town of Åbybro, then home to 1,000 people, about 5 miles north-east of the target. He would reconvene with some of his 82 Squadron colleagues in Oflag 9, Schloss Spangenberg, more or less in the centre of Germany. Sgt Doughty would come back to Watton to find himself slated to fly with a new skipper on the 15th, but missing Ålborg only postponed his fortune (see Postscript).
Squadron Leader Norman Jones, replacement flight commander for Hurll Chester, had flown his first op with 82 Squadron on 24 July, an innocuous dawn weather recco, with old hand John Bristow in the turret and new boy P/O Tom Cranidge as observer. They did five more ops together before this one, with Jones leading the second section of A Flight, behind Lart’s, although the second section now was down to two. In came the fighters.
John Bristow was very busy indeed in his turret, wondering how on earth he was supposed to achieve the maker’s specified firing rate of 1,200 rounds a minute, which would mean changing his 100-round pans every five seconds, and since he was only carrying a little more than a specified minute’s worth of ammo, and the combined firing rate of three Me109s was almost incalculable, and however many rounds he shot off at the bastards it didn’t seem to make any difference … Bristow: ‘Running was not likely to be a great success when really all we had was a single and not very good machine gun in the turret and a single and probably useless rear-firing one under the nose. Against that, we had a 109 underneath and behind us, another above and behind us, and one coming in on the starboard beam, all much faster and with cannon as well
as machine guns.’
The Blenheim had no chance. It was when, not if, the ever-increasing number of bullets and holes became terminal. Surprisingly, considering the sheer volume of munitions directed at his aircraft, Bristow’s part of it was still more or less entire.
We were soon on fire. I was blasting away at our pursuers, and I turned to the front to see what had happened. Normally, I’d be able to see the heads of the pilot and the observer but they weren’t there. There was no reply on the intercom so I had to assume they had been killed in the fighters’ attack. Now the port wing was really ablaze and we were going down fast, from not very high up.
Flying with the section leader meant we had the camera, which was fitted over the emergency escape hatch underneath my turret, so to get out I had to unship the camera first. Then I could kick out the hatch, clip on my parachute and dive through the hole.
John Bristow had nature against him. The wind and the G-force caused by the almost vertical, high-speed dive made a clear jump impossible and he was swung back from whence he came.
‘My feet were trapped and I was being pressed hard against the outside of the fuselage. I could not move at all, no matter how much I tried to push myself away with one hand, while I kept hold of my chute ripcord with the other.’
Bristow had not had the foresight of Bill Magrath and still carried his chocolate ration. Even in this desperate situation, he could still feel severe disappointment as the wind sucked the chocolate pack from his pocket. As it zipped past his face, he did have cause for thanks for a different kind of foresight:
The Squadron That Died Twice Page 11
