1 Group

by Patrick Otter

  One of the other 166 Squadron aircraft lost that night was flown by F/Sgt Bill Hylder, whose flight engineer, F/Sgt Ron Guscott, was a ‘supernumerary’ pilot remustered as an engineer. Both were killed as was another flight-engineer /pilot, Sgt Derek Jones, who was lost in F/O Patrick Rolls’ crew from 625 Squadron.

  C Flight, 550 Squadron pictured at North Killingholme, spring 1945. (Peter Sarll)

  Frank Woodley was the mid-upper gunner in a 550 Squadron Lancaster that night and witnessed at first hand the terrible toll of 1 Group Lancasters. At one stage in the raid he spotted a Ju88 250ft above them flying at the same speed and the same course. His pilot ordered the gunners not to fire and, after three minutes or so, the night fighter peeled off and disappeared. A few minutes later a Me210 crossed their path, little more than 50ft away.

  Two of the aircraft which went to Nuremburg that night from Waltham were the veterans Able Mabel and N-Nan, both of which had taken part in the 1944 attack. Mabel made it back safely but Nan, which was being flown by F/O George Dauphinee, was attacked by a night fighter and two engines set on fire. As the crew prepared to bail out the Lancaster exploded and only two members of the crew, the wireless operator P/O Roy Bailey and the navigator, F/O Bruce Douglas, survived, although, like Kevin Muncer, they were injured falling into trees. Nan had been the last Waltham aircraft to take off that night and it was to be the last Lancaster lost from the airfield.

  What made the losses that night particularly hard was that it was clear to all that the war in Europe was almost over and every crew now with 1 Group had high expectations of survival, something those who had flown in 1942, 1943 or 1944 certainly didn’t have. Those expectations must have been uppermost in the minds of 23-year-old Canadian F/O Alf Lockyer and his crew when they arrived at North Killingholme on the eve of the Nuremburg raid. The following day they took Lancaster Fox-Two on their first training operation with 550 and they were almost in sight of the airfield when they were attacked by a Luftwaffe intruder and crashed on Sunk Island in the Humber, only the flight engineer survived. They had been with the squadron barely long enough for anyone to get to know them.

  Bomber Command was to drop more bombs in the six weeks up to the end of March than in the entire first two years of the Second World War and 1 Group was in the forefront of that, priding itself on its squadrons carrying a heavier bomb load than in other groups. Daylight operations were by now virtually the order of the day with only occasional attacks being staged at night.550 Squadron was always at the top of the Group bombing tables thanks largely to the work of the station Armaments Officer, S/Ldr Hugh Gardiner and the Engineering Officer, S/Ldr George Cooper, two men the former CO, W/Cmdr Bryan Bell, remembered as ‘outstanding officers’.

  It was one of these daylight raids which was to claim one of 101 Squadron’s veteran Lancasters and see a flight engineer from the squadron win 1 Group’s final CGM of the war. It went to Sgt Jeffrey Wheeler who was seriously wounded by a fragment of an anti-aircraft shell while his aircraft was involved in the raid on an oil refinery near Bremen. He didn’t report his injuries until the aircraft was well clear of the target and then insisted on remaining at his post to help get the damaged Lancaster back to Ludford. Two other aircraft failed to return to Ludford from that attack, including the veteran SR-R ‘The Saint’, which was on its 122nd operation, with the loss of the crew of F/O Ralph Little, an American serving in the RCAF. Three crew members from the second 101 aircraft survived after it exploded after being hit by flak.

  The end of March brought a significant event in 1 Group’s wartime history, the end of operations from Waltham. 100 Squadron flew its last operation from the airfield on March 31 when its aircraft went to Hamburg. When the squadron returned it was told to prepare to pack up and leave for Elsham where it was to spend the remainder of the war, celebrating its move by what must have been a spectacular ‘beat-up’ of one of the best-loved of all RAF bomber airfields. The end of flying at Waltham was quickly followed by the closure of Kelstern as 12 Base was disbanded. 625 Squadron flew its last operation from there on the afternoon of April 3 when 247 1 Group Lancasters bombed Nordhausen, where V2 rockets were being assembled by slave workers in underground tunnels from the adjoining Mittelbau concentration camp. Two aircraft were lost, those of F/O Leslie Driver RNZAF of 626 Squadron, and F/Sgt Tom Collier and crew, who had only recently joined 625 at Kelstern. After the raid the remainder of 625 moved to Scampton for the final month of the war.

  One of 1 Group’s last night raids of the war was staged on the synthetic refinery at Lutzkendorf, near Leipzig on the night of April 4-5. Two aircraft were lost and a third crashed on its return. One of the Lancasters shot down was F/Lt Walter Kroeker’s from 12 Squadron at Wickenby. In January 1944 this crew had crash-landed their Lancaster in Sweden after a raid on Stettin and spent much of the year in internment before being repatriated and rejoining the squadron in the autumn. Six of those were to be killed on the Lutzkendorf raid with 35-year-old F/O Charles Biddlecombe joining them as a replacement mid-upper gunner.

  On the same night 30 Lancasters were detached for mine-laying duties off the Norwegian coast and in the Kattegat and that particular operation was to lead to the loss of eight aircraft. One of them was being flown by 153 Squadron’s CO W/Cmdr Francis Powley, a much-decorated Canadian who had been a pre-war regular in the RAF. He was a former CO of 166 Squadron and had a DFC and an Air Force Cross to his name. These operations were hated by aircrew, not least because of the higher-than-average losses incurred with the ever-present threat of fighters, flak ships and the dangers inherent in low-level flying. That night, despite having a premonition that he would not return, W/Cmdr Powley put himself on the Battle Order in an effort to lift morale at Scampton. He flew with S/Ldr John Gee’s crew and his aircraft was believed to have been shot down off the Danish coast. Another Lancaster from 153, flown by F/Lt Art Winder, also failed to return along with two from 626 Squadron and one each from 103, 550 and 576 Squadrons, with just six men from the Fiskerton Lancaster surviving.

  These were to be the last significant losses suffered by 1 Group. Two aircraft, one from 170 Squadron at Hemswell and the second from 300 at Faldingworth, were shot down in an attack on the harbour at Kiel which saw the battle cruiser Admiral Scheer capsize and the Hipper and Emden wrecked. All 1 Group’s aircraft returned safely from an attack on Potsdam, the first time most crews had been over the Berlin area, while the last casualties occurred on April 22 in an attack on Bremen in support of an assault by British infantry. F/O Arthur Cockcroft and his crew, whose average age was just 21, had only recently joined the squadron at Scampton. They took off shortly after 3.30pm on the afternoon of March 22 and it is likely their aircraft was hit by flak near the target, the Lancaster crashing close to the coast near Wilhelmshaven. There were no survivors.

  Three days later 1 Group’s Lancasters were bombed up for the last time in the war. Their target was to be Hitler’s ‘Eagle Nest’ building and the nearby SS barracks at Berchtesgaden in southern Bavaria and they joined 5 Group in an all-Lincolnshire raid on a target more symbolic than strategic. Crews were woken at around midnight for the pre-op briefing and the first aircraft were airborne before 5am. Two Lancasters were lost, one from 5 Group’s 619 Squadron with its crew and the second from 460 at Binbrook, the six Australians and the British flight engineer in F/O Harold Payne’s crew spending the next few days as prisoners. It was a fitting finale for the Aussies at Binbrook, Anzac day.

  There were no celebrations when the Lancasters arrived back at their airfields. There almost certainly would have been had the men of 1 Group known that, for them, the bombing war was finally over.

  Chapter 21

  ‘Living in a Sea of Mud’

  Life on a 1 Group Airfield

  Today little remains of most of the 26 heavy bomber airfields which were scattered right across Lincolnshire by summer of 1944. Some have been turned to other uses while others have vanished completely, swallowed up by developers, industri
al users or simply returned to the soil from which they grew.

  Yet during wartime they were all virtually small towns in their own right, each populated by more than 2,000 young men and women dressed in regulation blue, all doing a job which almost nightly brought back-breaking work in the harshest conditions, fear and courage in almost equal measure and more tragedy than today we can ever imagine.

  Some notable attempts have been made at scattered museums to capture the essence of what it was like to serve on those airfields, where pre-war King’s Regulations and service traditions were often stretched and twisted to meet the demands of the bomber war. But the real essence of what life was like on those airfields almost 70 years ago is best viewed through the memories of the dwindling number of survivors and the letters the men and women of Bomber Command left behind.

  As we have seen, the airfields themselves varied widely, from the solidly built pre-war bases at Hemswell, Binbrook and Lindholme to the near gerry-built aerodromes at Sandtoft, North Killingholme and Faldingworth. Ludford and Kelstern were at the highest altitude of any Bomber Command airfield and conditions there at times were, at times, awful. In between came the airfields constructed early in the war, Waltham, Kirmington and Elsham Wolds, each relatively well-built and, by RAF standards, reasonably comfortable. Blyton bucked the trend by falling into both the second and third category by being built badly early in the war. The Yorkshire airfields 1 Group used early in the war, Breighton, Holme-on-Spalding Moor and Snaith were all rather cheerless places and then there was Ingham, the only airfield in 1 Group not to get hardened runways and, as such, never to progress beyond Wellington operations, ending the war as home to a small support unit.

  Aircrew tended to find conditions better than ground staff. For a start, they were only usually at a particular airfield for a few months, if they were lucky to survive that long. Ground crews and station staff could find themselves stuck at an airfield for years at a time.

  It wasn’t just aircraft that were given names. An unidentified driver poses before his lorry at Wickenby in 1944. (Wickenby Archive)

  John Wilkins flew as a navigator with both 12 and 101 Squadrons before ending up in pathfinders at Warboys. During his time at Wickenby, 12 Squadron went through a period of heavy losses and he remembers seeing tearful groups of WAAFs on his arrival there following a particularly bad night for 12 Squadron.

  ‘Conditions at Wickenby were bloody awful most of the time,’ he remembered, ‘but not as bloody awful as Faldingworth, where we spent some time on detachment with 101 Squadron. It was generally regarded as the worst station of all in 1 Group. It was built on a bog and, as a result, the runways went up and down like nobody’s business. Pilots always said that if you had to make a force landing chose anywhere but Faldingworth.’

  His recollections of Faldingworth were shared by Audrey Brown, who served there as a WAAF driver during the winter of 1943-44. Wet was the norm, she recalled, and that extended even to the inside of the Nissen huts in which the WAAFs lived. Several were built actually into the ground, meaning a step down once you got inside. The ground was either saturated or frozen for much of that winter and her hut was almost permanently flooded, so much so that the bottom bunks were unusable and boxes containing clothes and personal possessions would often be found floating around the building. Wellington boots were prized possessions and were worn constantly.

  Her work involving driving crews to and from dispersals, driving the ration and coal trucks and occasionally helping out getting bombers down on foggy nights. These were in the days before fog-dispersal equipment and in misty conditions the WAAFs were sent out to set paraffin-filled ‘goose lights’ along runways to increase visibility. When the mist turned to fog they had to drive the trucks out, line them up alongside runways and turned on the headlights to help get aircraft down.

  B Flight ground crew pictured on a Lancaster’s Merlin engine, 103 Squadron, Elsham Wolds. (Elsham Wolds Association)

  A typical scene on a Lincolnshire bomber airfield. This was Ludford Magna where the water arrived in buckets (or from the sky), Nissen huts were everywhere and a bike was essential. (Vic Redfern)

  The local pub played an essential part in the lives of thousands of airmen. This was the Marrowbone and Cleaver in Kirmington – or ‘The Chopper’ as it was better known – around 1944. (Jim Wright, 166 Squadron Association)

  Almost a home-from-home – one of the huts at North Killingholme came complete with its own fireplace. (Roland Hardy)

  Audrey’s time at Faldingworth coincided with the station’s period as a heavy conversion unit and this involved aircrew only being there for a few weeks at the most. This meant that for the WAAFs the few romantic liaisons that were struck up were very short-lived indeed, not that there was much time for socialising with the girls working 12-hour shifts and being expected to help out whenever any snow needed clearing.

  The first WAAFs to arrive at North Killingholme when the station opened in January 1944 had a particularly bad time. May Peet was a mess waitress and had been posted into 1 Group from Syerston where her ‘customers’ had once included Guy Gibson in his pre-Dambusters days. She spent her first fortnight in 1 Group at Waltham, where she found conditions very good, but was then posted to North Killingholme and was in for something of a shock. Her work was in the officers’ mess and it was a long trek from the temporary WAAF quarters, which were in the neighbouring village of East Halton, particularly during the heavy snowfalls which were a feature of her first few weeks with 550 Squadron. Conditions did improve later, particularly after the opening of a new WAAF site closer to the airfield but North Killingholme always remained something of a rough-and-ready airfield. The spirit was good, she recalled, and the WAAFs were able to enjoy regular nights out at the nearby American fighter airfield at Goxhill – ‘we only went for the grub, it was so much better than ours’ – and visits to May Gabriel’s fish and chip hut in nearby South Killingholme.

  The conditions on airfields like Wickenby and Faldingworth were in stark contrast to those on the pre-war airfields at Hemswell and Binbrook. Ken Penrose served as a wireless mechanic in 1941 with 12 Squadron at Binbrook and later volunteered for aircrew and, after a hair-raising time at Sandtoft flying worn out Halifaxes, found himself posted back to 12 Squadron, this time as the wireless operator in a Lancaster crew. ‘I was delighted,’ he said, ‘because I remembered what a great base Binbrook was with brick buildings which were well heated and excellent messes. It was therefore a shock when we got our rail warrants and found we were going to Wickenby. I hadn’t realised the squadron had moved! Wickenby was in the middle of nowhere and we were just living in a sea of mud. There was a good spirit about the place, though.’

  Perhaps the worst time to serve at a particular airfield was when it had just opened. At Kirmington, which eventually became one of the better wartime airfields, the first arrivals found no heating whatsoever in any of the accommodation huts. The stoves had not been delivered and there was no sign of them. Thankfully, resourceful members of the ground crew rounded up all the empty oil drums they could find, punched holes in them and fitted them in huts as coke-burning braziers.

  Arthur Miles was an electrician in the advance party which moved from Holme-on-Spalding Moor to Ludford in the summer of 1943. Little did he know it but he was to see Ludford at its best, relatively free of the mud for which it would become infamous. Accommodation, however, was a different matter. The place was still far from finished and Arthur and his section had to spend six months sleeping on ‘biscuit’ mattresses in the camp cinema. They were the lucky ones, others had to make do with bell tents.

  Although Waltham was a relatively well-drained airfield, Wellington boots were still the order of the day in this picture of ground crew assembled alongside 100 Squadron’s HW-V Vergeltungswaffe – Waltham’s own version of a V-weapon. (Author’s collection)

  Ludford Magna earned the unfortunate nickname ‘Mudford Magna’ and conditions there came as a bit of a shock to new
comers. Among them was Gerry Parfitt, a radar mechanic posted to Ludford from Linton-on-Ouse in the summer of 1943 shortly after the station opened. ‘It was a bit of a shock after serving on a peace-time station like Linton,’ he recalled. ‘They were all prefab buildings and Nissen huts with precious little in the way of heating, just a small stove and a ration of coke or coal which didn’t last long. After that, it was just a case of scrounging.’

  He remembers Ludford as being a very large airfield, even by Linton-on-Ouse standards. Most of the accommodation sites were north of the Louth to Market Rasen road which runs through the villages of Ludford Magna and Ludford Parva, while the airfield lay to the south and then it was a case of a long cycle ride through the village, turning down by a path at the side of the Black Horse pub, onto the aerodrome, past the Astra cinema and the WAAF site, through the main entrance, past the headquarters buildings and on to the radar section, a white concrete block building behind the main hangar.

  Herbert Harrison flew as a flight engineer with 101and remembers being given some sound advice when he arrived at Ludford – get yourself a good pair of Wellington boots. ‘It was a quagmire, like living in a sea of mud,’ he recalled. ‘It was good advice to get some gum boots, you even needed them to get to the toilets in the middle of the night. There’s no doubt Ludford could be a grim place, but it had its good points. Some of the villages round there were the most beautiful I have ever seen.’ Tealby was a favourite with 101 personnel, not the least because of the King’s Head, one of the most attractive pubs in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Local landowner Lord Heneage also opened up his tree-lined fishing pond at Benniworth for the squadron to use as a swimming pool.