After the Flood

by John Nichol

  Fred Sutherland, speaking from his home in Canada seventy years on, perhaps encapsulates the emotions of all those wartime evaders:

  The whole experience was quite unreal, just like living in a movie. It was all very nerve-racking and I didn’t rate my chances of making it home, but it was worth a try. The Dutch people were risking their own lives to help me. Without them I would have been captured or dead and I can never thank them enough for that. And when I was on the ground – seeing the Nazis close up – that’s when I realised we had to win this war; regardless of the cost.

  * * *

  For the families of the dead, the ramifications of the disastrous Dortmund–Ems raid went on for months as they struggled to come to terms with their loss, and to understand how their loved ones had perished. David Maltby’s father, Ettrick, received a letter from the mother of Maltby’s navigator, Vivian Nicholson, desperate to find out how her own son had died. She was heartbreakingly eloquent in her expression of her grief.

  ‘I scarcely know how to write this letter,’ Elizabeth Nicholson wrote.

  We would like to know the true facts of what they did that night and would be gratefully thankful for any news you could give us. We have a photo of your gallant son and our boy together. It is indeed a terrible wound for us to see them so young, happy and beautiful. Our boy was conscientious, very guarded about his duties. Please, if your son told you anything [about our son], we would indeed be grateful if you could let us know. I know you will understand my yearning for news, and I have the worry of our second son aged 19 on the submarine HMS Seanymph. The world owes so much to these gallant young men. We can only wait patiently till we can understand why they are taken from our homes, where their places can never be filled.24

  Many of the young men taking to the skies that night had left ‘last letters’ to be delivered to their loved ones if they were killed. Maltby’s wireless operator, Antony Stone, was no exception. His mother received her son’s final letter shortly after his death. ‘I will have ended happily,’ he wrote, ‘so have no fears of how I ended as I have the finest crowd of fellows with me, and if Skipper goes I will be glad to go with him.’25

  Many more letters, to parents of the bereaved, and from those who had made the ultimate sacrifice, would be delivered before the war was over.

  CHAPTER 3

  Press On, Regardless

  Bomber Command’s Main Force had continued to pound Germany during the autumn and early winter of 1943, including a raid on Kassel on 22/23 October that caused a week-long firestorm in the town and killed 10,000 people, and the launch of the ‘Battle of Berlin’, a six-month bombing campaign against the German capital, beginning on 18/19 November. Over the course of the campaign some 9,000 sorties would be flown and almost 30,000 tons of bombs dropped. Bomber Harris’s claim that though ‘it will cost us between 400–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war’1 proved optimistic; the aircraft losses were over twice as heavy and the bombing campaign did not destroy the city, nor the morale of its population, nor the Nazis’ willingness to continue the war. In contrast, the heavy losses sustained by Main Force during this period undoubtedly had an effect on morale.

  Following George Holden’s death at Dortmund–Ems, Mick Martin had been put in temporary charge of 617 Squadron, but because he had jumped two ranks from Flight Lieutenant direct to Wing Commander, some felt his face still did not fit, and on 10 November 1943 he was replaced by a new commander, a tall, dark-haired and gaunt-faced figure: Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire. Still only twenty-six, Cheshire was one of the RAF’s most decorated pilots and its youngest Group Captain, who had taken a drop in rank in order to command 617.

  Cheshire made a dramatic entrance to his new squadron. Gunner Chan Chandler was in his room at the Petwood Hotel when there was a shot directly outside his window. ‘I looked out and saw this chap with a revolver in his hand, called him a bloody lunatic and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. He replied that he thought the place needed waking up! It turned out he was the new CO and my first words to him were to call him a bloody lunatic! However, we got on famously after that.’2

  Leonard Cheshire

  At his first squadron meeting Cheshire told his men that ‘If you get into trouble when you’re off duty, I will do what I can to help you. If you get into trouble on duty, I’ll make life a hell of a lot worse for you.’

  ‘So we all knew where we stood from the start,’ Johnny Johnson says. Far more approachable and friendly than Guy Gibson, Cheshire was soon highly thought of by all. ‘He developed the techniques for marking, for instance,’ Johnson says, ‘so the efficiency of the squadron was improved. That was always his objective: to get things absolutely right.’

  Larry Curtis found Cheshire ‘very quiet, very relaxed, but at the same time, you did what you were told; he just approached it in a different way.’3 Malcolm ‘Mac’ Hamilton witnessed this new approach when he joined the squadron. His crew had achieved an impressive bombing accuracy of 70 yards before joining 617, and when he met Cheshire for the first time, Cheshire said, ‘Oh, Hamilton, I see your crew have won the 5 Group bombing trophy three months running.’

  Hamilton acknowledged this, ‘putting my chest out, because I was quite proud’.

  Cheshire frowned. ‘Well, I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you six weeks to get your accuracy down to twenty-seven yards, or you’re off the squadron.’4

  He was only half-joking. On 617 Squadron, everything revolved around accuracy in bombing. Before they were allowed on ops, every new crew was required to carry out at least three six-bomb practice drops on the ranges at Wainfleet on the Wash in Lincolnshire. The crew’s accuracy was assessed and the results added to the Bombing Error Ladder kept by the Bombing Leader. Crews with the highest accuracy – and the results of even the most experienced crews were continually updated – were assigned the most ops and the most important roles on those ops, and those with poorer records would find themselves left out, or even transferred off the squadron altogether, if their results did not improve. Cheshire was relentless in raising standards, but he set himself the highest standards of all, and was universally admired and even loved by the men under his command. ‘He was a great man,’ Johnny Johnson says, ‘and the finest commander I served under.’5

  * * *

  In the autumn of 1943, during the continuing lull in ops that followed the disaster of Dortmund–Ems, 617 had been practising high-level bombing with new 12,000-pound ‘Blockbuster’ HC bombs – the equivalent of three 4,000-pound ‘cookies’ bolted together.

  One of the squadron’s rear gunners, Tom Simpson, was lugging his Browning machine guns to the firing range one morning with 400 rounds of ammunition draped around his neck, when a ‘silver-haired, mature gentleman’ approached. A civilian on the base was an unusual sight, but the man seemed to know his way around. He asked if he could walk with Simpson and helped to carry one of the guns. After Simpson had installed the guns in the practice turret and fired off a few bursts himself, he noticed the stranger’s ‘deep blue eyes gleaming’ and asked, ‘Would you like to sit in here and have a little dab yourself?’

  The man didn’t need a second invitation. Having watched him fire both guns singly, Simpson invited him to fire off the last hundred rounds using both guns together. After doing so, he was ‘trembling with excitement and pleasure’ as he climbed out of the turret. ‘That was really fantastic,’ he said. ‘I had no idea of the magnitude and firepower a rear gunner has at his disposal.’ Only later did Simpson realise that the silver-haired, mature gentleman was Barnes Wallis.6 When he mentioned the incident to Mick Martin, he told him that Wallis was developing even bigger and better bombs for the squadron. Within a few months they would all have the proof of that.

  Barnes Wallis

  Wallis, whose wife’s sister and brother-in-law had been killed by a German bomb in 1940, had already devised Upkeep – the ‘bouncing bomb’ used on the Dams raid. Forever innovative and forward-looking, he had never believe
d that carpet bombing could break German resolve, any more than the Blitz had broken Britain’s will to fight. Instead, he had argued from the start for precision bombing of high-value economic, military and infrastructure targets, and designed a series of weapons capable of doing so. He had been given the task of creating newer, ever more destructive weapons that could penetrate and destroy heavily fortified concrete bunkers and other targets, previously invulnerable to conventional attack.

  A vegetarian non-smoker, Barnes Wallis came from a respectable middle-class background – his father was a doctor and his grandfather a priest – yet at sixteen years old, he had set his face against the advice of his parents and teachers and left school to take up an apprenticeship as an engineer. In later years, his daughter Mary attributed that decision to an experience when he was very young and his mother had taken him to a foundry to see the men and machinery at work. ‘The size, power, the noise of machinery in the light of the flames from the foundry furnace’ may have made a lasting impression on him.

  Whatever the reasons, Wallis’s career path was set, though at first he showed more interest in the sea than in the air, training as a marine engineer, before being recruited by Vickers to work on airship design. An engineering genius, he worked as the chief designer on the R100 airship, ‘a perfect silver fish gliding through the air … a luxury liner compared with the sardine-tin passenger aircraft of today’. Having pioneered the geodetic system of construction in airships (more commonly called geodesic) – a latticework system of construction that produced a very light metal structure that nonetheless possessed great strength – he went on to apply it to military aircraft too, first using it on the airframe of the Wellington bomber. Despite his considerable achievements, he was a warm, humane and profoundly modest man. ‘We technical men like to keep in the background,’7 he said, and a friend and work colleague remarked that: ‘He would sooner talk about his garden than himself.’

  Although he had designed aircraft, Wallis knew very little about bomb construction, but right from the outset of the war he resolved to put that right as quickly as possible. One of his early discoveries was that the explosive power of a bomb is proportional to the cube of the weight of the charge it carries, so that, for example, a 2,000-pound bomb would have eight times the impact of a bomb half its weight. He also learned that the pressure wave from an explosion is transmitted far more efficiently through the ground or through water than it is through air. Both of those discoveries were reflected in the design of the ‘Upkeep’, ‘Tallboy’ and ‘Grand Slam’ bombs he subsequently produced.

  In addition to the new bombs Barnes Wallis was producing, 617 Squadron were now using a new and far more accurate bombsight. Shortly before Leonard Cheshire’s arrival, 617 had begun training with the sophisticated new SABS. Its only major drawback was that it required a long, straight and level run to the dropping point, reducing the pilots’ ability to make evasive manoeuvres and increasing their vulnerability to flak and fighter attack.

  Wireless operator Larry Curtis always dreaded that vulnerable time, flying straight and level with the bomb-aimer in virtual control of the aircraft:

  As long as you were busy, you never thought about anything except the job you were doing. But when it came to the bombing run, and to a great extent your duties were finished, it was then that you became aware that you were very vulnerable and people were actually trying to kill you. In the radio operator’s cabin there was a steel pole – some sort of support – and I used to hang on to it like grim death. I’ve always said if anyone could find that steel pole, they’d find my fingerprints embedded in it – and I’m not joking. It did come home very forcefully; I’m sure everyone would agree that was the time you dreaded.8

  There was no man on the squadron who did not feel fear at times, but, says one of the squadron’s wireless operators, ‘it was all about pushing fears to one side. I think if anyone said they were never afraid, I’d say they were either not there, or they’re lying. There was no possibility you couldn’t be scared at some points.’9

  Even the squadron’s greatest heroes were not immune to fear. Wilfred Bickley, an air gunner who joined 617 at the same time as the great Leonard Cheshire, VC, once asked him, ‘Do you ever get scared?’

  ‘Of course I get scared,’ Cheshire said.

  Bickley broke into a broad grin. ‘Thanks for that, you’ve made my day.’10

  At a reunion after the war, Cheshire also said to one of his former men on 617 Squadron: ‘I could have been a pilot or at a pinch a navigator, but could never have done the other crew jobs; there was too much time to think, to be isolated, to dwell on what was going on around you. I never felt fear as a pilot, but as a passenger, I certainly felt it!’11

  * * *

  The use of the new SABS bombsights in training on the ranges at Wainfleet had led to a huge improvement in accuracy, but the first real chance to assess their effectiveness under operational conditions came in raids against Hitler’s new ‘V-weapons’. ‘V’ stood for Vergeltungswaffen (‘vengeance weapons’), and these ‘terror weapons’ were the Nazis’ chosen method of retaliation for the relentless Allied bombing of German cities. Lacking the heavy bombers and air superiority required to inflict similar damage on Britain, Hitler had authorised the development of three V-weapons: the V-1 ‘flying bombs’ – an early forerunner of modern-day Cruise missiles, christened ‘buzz-bombs’ or ‘doodlebugs’ by Londoners – the V-2 Feuerteufel (‘Fire Devil’) rocket, and the V-3 ‘Supergun’. Reinforced underground sites were being constructed in the Pas de Calais, in occupied France, where the weapons could be assembled and then launched against Britain. Most of the work was carried out by the forced labour of concentration camp inmates, PoWs, Germans rejected for military service and men and women from the Nazi-occupied countries. They were slave labourers, worked round the clock and fed near-starvation rations, and many did not survive.

  Destruction of the plants where the V-1s were being manufactured and the ramps from which they were to be launched had become an increasingly urgent priority. 617’s aircrews were briefed about the sites and what they meant. ‘We were trying to obliterate them before they were even made.’

  Intelligence on the German V-weapon sites came both from reports by French Resistance members of unusual building activity, and from RAF large-scale photographic reconnaissance missions, which covered the entire northern French coast for up to 50 kilometres inland. Sporadic attacks were launched by Main Force squadrons but inflicted only superficial damage.

  The task of finding and eliminating the V-weapon sites was made harder by the camouflage used by the Germans – some nets covering buildings were ‘painted to look like roads and small buildings’.12 The wooded terrain in which most of the weapons were sited also hindered attacks, but the biggest problem was the poor visibility and persistent fogs that shrouded the Channel coast of Occupied France for many winter weeks.

  On the night of 16/17 December, 617 Squadron joined the assault on Hitler’s vengeance weapons, with a raid on a site at Flixecourt, south of Abbeville, where they were led into battle for the first time by Leonard Cheshire. A system of markers was use to aid accuracy in navigation and bombing. Parachute markers that floated slowly down were used to mark both turning points on the route to the target and the target itself, and target indicators, burning in different colours, were also utilised. On this op, a Mosquito from Pathfinder Force – the specialist squadrons that carried out target marking for Main Force ops – was marking the target from high level using Oboe (the ground-controlled, blind-bombing system that directed a narrow radio beam towards the target). However, the target indicators it dropped were 350 yards from the centre of the target, and such was 617 Squadron’s accuracy with their new SABS – their average error was less than 100 yards – that, although they peppered the markers with their 12,000-pound bombs, none of them hit the target.

  Although unsuccessful, the failure in target marking at Flixecourt did have positive consequences, for i
t served as the catalyst for Cheshire and his 617 Squadron crews to begin lobbying for a change in the marking system. Deeply frustrated by the failure of the raid, despite the phenomenal accuracy of their bombing, Mick Martin argued vehemently that it was pointless for the squadron to be dependent on markers dropped from height when flying missions that risked, and often cost, the lives of 617’s aircrews. Far better, he said, for himself or somebody else in the squadron to take on the responsibility of marking the target at low level, but at first ‘Nobody seemed to listen,’ one of his crewmates recalled, ‘and I think Mick got sick of volunteering and making his suggestions.’13

  However, Leonard Cheshire may already have been thinking along similar lines, and he became an equally fervent advocate of low-level marking. The 5 Group commander, Air Vice Marshal Ralph Cochrane, lent his support to the idea, driven in part at least by his intense personal rivalry with Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, the commander of 8 Group, which included the Pathfinder Force. Cochrane lobbied hard for a trial of the low-level system and also argued forcibly that ‘his’ 617 Squadron could mark and destroy targets that were beyond the capabilities of 8 Group and its Pathfinders. Cochrane’s lobbying eventually proved successful, but if it was to be anything more than a short-term experiment, 617 would have to back up his words with actions.

  Attempts to follow up the Flixecourt raid with a series of further attacks on V-weapon sites that December were aborted because of bad weather and poor visibility, but such conditions were, of course, no deterrent to the construction of the unmanned V-1 flying bombs that would eventually strike London.