After the Flood

by John Nichol

  Six Mosquito fighter-bombers were to escort the squadron’s Lancasters, operating as ‘can-openers’ by dealing with any flak hot-spots on the route. The Lancasters were to approach the target at extreme low level – 30 feet over Holland and Germany – before climbing to 150 feet to bomb. Although they had been practising for several weeks, flying low level along English canals, first by day and later by night, not everyone was happy with the idea of another low level attack on a heavily defended target. ‘Our losses at the dams had been around fifty per cent,’ Fred Sutherland says. ‘And certainly I had doubts about this next op. My main concern was flying around at night, at very low level, with all those power cables criss-crossing everywhere.’

  Born in 1923, Sutherland was Canadian, a full Cree Native American, who had volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force the minute he turned eighteen. ‘I couldn’t wait to get in the war in any way possible,’ he says. ‘Everybody wanted to get in. We were still suffering from the Depression, unemployment was high and it was a means to escape all that. All the talk was about the war and I wanted to be involved. I didn’t really understand what it would be like though, I had no idea what was to come, what I’d go through, so I suppose I was naive.’ After completing an air gunner’s course, he crewed up with Les Knight, a ‘short but very muscular’ Australian pilot, ‘strong in the shoulders and arms. He was a wonderful pilot,’ Sutherland says, ‘very quiet, but if you were out of line, he quietly told you that you’d better not do that again.’

  David Maltby’s crew

  One of the two four-ships – formations of four aircraft – making the raid was to be led by Squadron Leader David Maltby, a very skilful pilot who had completed thirty ops over Germany and been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross even before joining 617. Still only twenty-three, having struck the fatal blow against the Möhne dam, he was now one of the most highly decorated officers in the RAF and, like his comrades on the Dams raid, a national celebrity. A fun-loving, gentle giant over six feet tall, he was the life and soul of every party and always up for a prank; while training for the Dams raid, he had often ‘buzzed’ his wife Nina’s family farm. His first child, a son, had been born soon afterwards; the shock of Maltby’s aerobatics overhead may or may not have hastened the birth.

  Maltby’s personal good luck token was a filthy, oil-stained forage cap. He had worn it on the night of the Dams raid, never flew without it, and even wore it on parade. He donned it once more as he prepared to lead Operation Garlic – the raid on the Dortmund–Ems Canal. It would be his crew’s first operation since the dams, and they would be flying at low level, straight into anti-aircraft gunfire, just as they had at the dams. The op was scheduled as a night-time raid on 14 September 1943, and eight Lancasters took off around midnight, but were recalled within forty minutes because of cloud obscuring the target. However, that ‘boomerang’ order resulted in tragedy. After acknowledging the order to return to base, Maltby’s Lancaster crashed into the North Sea 8 miles off Cromer on the Norfolk coast, killing everyone on board. Famed as the man who breached the Möhne dam, Maltby had now joined the mounting tally of the squadron’s dead.

  Although the official accident report mentioned ‘some obscure explosion and a fire’ before the aircraft’s fatal crash, it was believed for many years that Maltby had simply misjudged his height and dipped a wing into the sea, with fatal consequences. However, a rival theory has recently been advanced, claiming that he collided with a Mosquito from 139 Squadron that was returning from a separate raid on similar routing, and was also lost without trace that night.5

  Dave Shannon circled over the crash site for over two hours until an air-sea rescue craft arrived, but Maltby’s body was the only one ever to be recovered; his fellow crew members were lost in the depths of the North Sea, and are listed simply as having ‘no known grave’. Their average age was just twenty. David Maltby is buried in a quiet corner of St Andrew’s churchyard at Wickhambreaux near Canterbury, the church in which he had married Nina just sixteen months earlier. His son, just ten weeks old at the time of Maltby’s death, would now never know his father.

  The following night, the surviving members of the squadron returned to the Dortmund–Ems Canal, with Mick Martin’s crew replacing Maltby’s. ‘Crews as a whole accepted the loss of a friend as a downside of the war in the air they were engaged in,’ Les Munro says, a view echoed by Larry Curtis. ‘One accepted the fact that you weren’t coming back from this war. I did and most people did and it helped a lot. You were frightened but you knew it had to be done, so you did it.’6 However, Maltby’s death had given some of the aircrews pause for thought, and there was considerable trepidation about the op. ‘I knew Dave Maltby,’ Johnny Johnson recalls. ‘He and Les Munro were on 97 Squadron with us, so when he’d been lost the night before, there was already a sense of it being a dodgy op.’7

  The nervousness about the op only served to strengthen the importance of the pre-flight rituals or superstitions that almost all the crews followed. Every aircraft was carrying eight men rather than the usual seven, with an extra gunner aboard to ensure that all the gun turrets would be manned at all times throughout the flight. Unlike most of the other crews, one of Les Knight’s crew’s rituals was not peeing on the rear wheel before boarding their aircraft, and when Les Woollard, the extra gunner they were carrying, began to do so they all rushed over and pulled him away. ‘We were not really bothered though,’ Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland says, ‘we were just fooling with him.’ Sutherland thinks his crew was not superstitious, but then adds, ‘but we always did the same routine. I always ate my chocolate bar when we were charging down the runway, and I always wore the same socks that my girlfriend, now my wife, had knitted for me.’

  Eight Lancasters, all carrying 12,000-pound delayed-action bombs, and flying in two four-ships, took off at midnight on a beautiful, clear moonlit night. As they crossed the North Sea, the lessons learned on the Dams raid led them to adopt a new method of crossing the hostile coastline. Instead of flying a constant low level approach, they climbed before reaching the coast, but then went into a shallow dive back to low level, building up speed before flashing over the coastal flak batteries. ‘And it really was low level,’ wireless operator Larry Curtis recalls. ‘I can remember the pilot pulling up to go over the high-tension cables.’8 ‘What was really scary for me were the power wires,’ adds Fred Sutherland, who had the closest view of them from his gun turret under his aircraft’s nose. ‘Even if there was moonlight, you couldn’t see the wires until you were practically on them, and once you hit them, that was it, you were done for.’

  George Holden led the formation, with Mick Martin on his starboard flank and Les Knight to port. Rear gunner Tom Simpson heard Martin and his bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, complaining that Holden was flying too high, allowing the searchlights to pick them up. ‘We seemed to be getting into a lot of trouble and I had never experienced such intense ground fire.’ Just before reaching the small German town of Nordhorn, Martin was, as usual, flying ‘lower than low’, squeezing between some factory chimney stacks, ‘the top of the stacks being higher than we were’, but Holden, still much higher, was drawing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Fred Sutherland, front gunner in Les Knight’s crew, whose job was to attack ‘any ground flak units that started firing at us, tried to return fire but couldn’t depress my gun enough because we were right on top of it’.

  Rather than skirting a white-painted church with a high steeple near the town centre at low level, Holden opted to fly over it. Moments later, his aircraft was hit by lines of red and green tracer that flashed upwards, biting into his starboard wing. Almost immediately the aircraft was engulfed in flames. ‘There was poor old Holden up about four hundred feet or more, being shot to blazes and on fire.’9

  Holden’s aircraft went out of control, diving and veering sharply to port. Les Knight had to haul on the controls to avoid a collision with his leader’s aircraft and within seconds Holden’s Lancaster had crashed and exploded wi
th the loss of everyone – Guy Gibson’s Dambusters crew – on board. It was Holden’s thirtieth birthday. ‘They just dived down, nearly hitting us on the way,’ Fred Sutherland recalls, ‘straight into the ground with a huge explosion. It was some sight – eight guys just dying in front of my eyes. They didn’t have a hope. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Your friends are getting killed and you are scared as hell but you can’t let it bother you; if you did, you could never do your job. You just think, “Thank God it wasn’t us.”’

  The blast from the crash almost brought down the two Lancasters flying close behind him, but, fortunately, his delay-fused 12,000-pounder didn’t explode. Had it detonated on impact, all the other aircraft in his formation, flying as low as 30 feet above the ground, would almost certainly have been destroyed as well. Instead an unfortunate German family whose farm was the site of Holden’s fatal crash suffered a tragic blow when the bomb detonated fifteen minutes later. Alerted by the anti-aircraft fire and the thunder of the approaching bombers, the farmer, his wife and their six children had been sheltering in a cellar beneath their farmhouse when the crash occurred. However, a few minutes later, the parents decided to go back upstairs to fetch some warm clothing for their shivering children. They were still above ground when the bomb exploded. The farmer survived, sheltered by one of the few pieces of wall to survive a blast that demolished every farm building and set fire to an avenue of oak trees, but his wife was killed instantly. She was the only German fatality from the raid.10

  The remaining aircraft re-formed, with Mick Martin taking over as leader, but ran into low-lying mist and fog over the Dortmund area, at times reducing visibility to as little as 500 yards. The haze was reflecting the moonlight and ‘making the whole scene appear like a silver veil. We could see practically no ground detail when flying into-moon.’11 They were supposed to bomb from 150 feet at two-minute intervals, but the fog and haze meant that the only time they could actually spot the canal was when they were already directly overhead and too late to drop their bombs on it. They kept circling, hoping for a break or eddy in the fog that would give them a sight of the target, but with no sign of the Mosquitos that were supposed to act as ‘can-openers’, suppressing the air defences, the Lancasters were making themselves ‘sitting ducks for the air defences putting up a wall of flak’, and the prowling night-fighters. They soon lost another aircraft, when Mick Martin’s rear gunner suddenly called out, ‘There goes Jerry Wilson.’ Flight Lieutenant Harold ‘Jerry’ Wilson’s Lancaster had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crashed into the canal bank, killing himself and all his crew.

  ‘There was only us and Micky Martin left by then from our formation,’ Les Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland, says. ‘It was a desperate scene unfolding around us; it was pretty scary.’ Soon afterwards, squinting into the fog, Sutherland froze as ‘trees atop a ridge just appeared in front of me, rushing towards me. Someone else screamed for Les to climb but it was too late.’ Sydney Hobday, the crew’s navigator, remembered the moment all too clearly, ‘To my horror,’ he says, ‘I saw the treetops straight ahead and thought we had at last “bought it” – after quite a good run for our money I admit!’

  The trees hit them on the port side, puncturing the radiators of both port engines and damaging the tail. Both port engines overheated and had to be shut down, and the starboard inner engine then began to fail as well.

  Knight fought to control his badly damaged aircraft as Edward ‘Johnny’ Johnson – not the member of Joe McCarthy’s crew married to Gwyn, but another bomb-aimer with a similar name – jettisoned the 12,000-pound bomb, praying that the delayed-action fuse would work, because, if not, they’d be blown to pieces as it detonated. It fell away silently and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The crew also threw out their guns and ammunition to lose weight as Knight tried to nurse his battered aircraft back to England, alternately feathering the port engines to cool them and then briefly restarting them as the aircraft dropped towards stalling speed.

  He called his rear gunner, Harry ‘Obie’ O’Brien, forward to haul on the exposed controls from the starboard rudder pedal to ease the strain on Knight’s leg as he battled to hold the damaged aircraft in straight and level flight, but it was a hopeless task. With the two port engines virtually useless and the starboard ones over-revving as they strained to keep the Lancaster airborne, the aircraft was constantly being pushed to port and still losing altitude, with the glide angle increasing steadily. Fear of what was to come gripped them all. ‘There was no smoke or flames,’ Sutherland says, ‘but we knew we didn’t have long.’ As they passed over Den Ham in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Knight realised he couldn’t control the aircraft much longer and ordered his men to bale out. Looking out, Sutherland thought they were over water, but once more it was just the moonlight reflecting from the layer of cloud below them, and when he pulled back the blackout curtain he saw the ground in front of them.

  The crew baled out one by one. ‘Bomb-aimer going, cheers, Les,’ Edward Johnson said.

  ‘Cheers and good luck, Johnny,’ Knight said, his voice showing none of the emotion he must have been feeling.

  Obie O’Brien also said his farewell and baled out from the rear hatch, and was followed moments later by Sutherland, who called, ‘Mid-upper gunner going out the back door, Les.’ He didn’t have his parachute on, but ‘quickly clipped it on and just jumped out the back door’. The extra gunner, Les Woollard, on his first flight with Knight’s crew, jumped at the same time, though Sutherland lost sight of him at once.

  Navigator Sidney Hobday baled out of the hatch in the nose and flight engineer Bob Kellow followed a heartbeat later. He’d disconnected his intercom and so couldn’t speak to Knight, but gave him a thumbs-up sign, and saw Knight’s answering signal before he tumbled out of the hatch.12

  None of Knight’s crew had ever talked about being shot down. Sutherland says:

  I don’t think we ever talked about the possibility, or what we would do. I remember Johnson always wore special shoes whenever we flew low level so he could walk out if we came down – he was prepared. But for me, whatever was going to happen would happen. I didn’t think too much about it. No one talked about it. We just hoped that the op would be over quickly, and we’d survive and get back to the Mess for a beer!13

  However, the first thing that every aircrew member found out about a new aircraft was ‘how to leave the plane in a hurry’. At one time crews practised baling out from a static aircraft on the ground, but ‘this produced so many twisted and broken limbs that it was put on hold’. An instructor at OTU – the Operational Training Unit, which all ranks had to attend before joining a unit on active service – also had a warning for trainee aircrew who baled out over the UK: ‘Remember to hold on to the ripcord handle and bring it back or you will be charged five bob for its replacement!’

  Like the rest of his crew, Sutherland had never used a parachute before, but after a heart-stopping pause when he pulled on the ripcord, his chute opened safely. ‘I hit the ground and stood up,’ he says. ‘A few hours before I’d been in England, now I was standing in enemy territory. It was quite a shock. I thought about my family getting a telegram to say I was missing, what would they think?’ As he did so, he saw Les Knight attempting a forced landing a quarter of a mile away, but sadly, by waiting for his crew to bale out, time had run out for Knight himself, ‘a classic example of the pilot sacrificing his life to allow the others to escape’.14 His stricken aircraft hit the trees, crashed and burst into flames, killing Knight instantly. His body, still at the controls, was retrieved by Dutch civilians who, in defiance of the German occupiers, buried him after conducting a funeral for him. ‘I owe my life to Les,’ Sutherland says. ‘He kept the aircraft steady as long as he could, so we could get out. Without him, I’d have been dead.’

  Sidney Hobday, who was a Lloyds clerk in peacetime, had also landed safely – albeit 30 feet up in the branches of a tree – and saw his skipper’s last momen
ts. ‘I imagine that when he let go of the stick, the plane dived straight to the deck … I shall never forget how he wished me good luck before I left … he was a good lad.’15

  Mick Martin had lost sight of Knight’s aircraft in the fog and did not know what had happened to him. He eventually identified the target ‘after stooging around for about an hour, but it was very hairy’, and he had to make thirteen passes over it before his bomb-aimer was sufficiently confident to release their bomb.

  Meanwhile, more of their comrades were being shot down. Flying Officer William Divall’s Lancaster came down a few miles away after being hit by flak. Having dropped his bomb into the canal, Divall crashed into the bank and the ensuing explosion flattened the trees flanking the canal and blew the rear turret, with the rear gunner’s body still inside it, right across to the opposite bank. All the crew died in the blast.

  Flight Lieutenant Ralf Allsebrook’s Lancaster was also hit by flak as he flew over the canal. A veteran of two tours with 49 Squadron, Allsebrook had joined 617 Squadron a few days after the Dams raid, and was not to survive his first op over Germany with them. He tried to make an emergency landing, but hit the roof of a house and then smashed into a crane on the canal bank, decapitating himself and killing his crew.

  The lethal anti-aircraft fire and the crashes caused by low-level flying in such poor visibility made it unsurprising that only two bombs – dropped by Mick Martin’s and Dave Shannon’s crews – landed anywhere near the target, one hitting the towpath, the other falling in the water without doing any significant damage to the canal. Even worse, the abortive raid had seen five of the eight Lancasters shot down or crash, leaving a trail of burning aircraft across the German countryside, and causing the loss of forty-one men’s lives, including thirteen of the survivors of the Dams raid that had made the squadron’s reputation. The op had also claimed the lives of David Maltby and his crew the previous night, making a total of six out of nine aircraft and their crews lost – a loss rate of two-thirds compared with the 5 per cent losses that the supposedly more vulnerable Main Force bombers were suffering on their mass raids on heavily defended German cities.