After the Flood

by John Nichol

  All the raiders returned safely, though pilot Ross Stanford barely made it back after losing two engines to anti-aircraft fire just after leaving the target. Stanford was an Australian cricketer who had made 416 not out as a fourteen-year-old but only ever played one first-class match. Run out without scoring while batting for New South Wales at the other end from Don Bradman, he was never picked again. Les Munro flew alongside him, escorting him all the way back to England. ‘He was losing height the whole way,’ Munro says, ‘but we managed to make it back to a diversion airfield and landed together. I loaded his crew up and flew them all back to Woodhall.’

  A week later, unaware both of the extent of the destruction that 617 Squadron had already wrought and of the German decision to abandon the site, and still fearing its reoccupation, USAAF commanders authorised a raid using pilotless radio-controlled Flying Fortresses, each loaded with 11 tonnes of TNT and Torpex High Explosive. As well as the V-3 site at Mimoyecques, they also targeted the V-1 and V-2 sites at Watten, Wizernes and Siracourt, but the op was a shambolic failure. On 12 August 1944 the US Navy attempted a further attack on Mimoyecques using a B-24 Liberator, but the aircraft exploded shortly after take-off, killing the crew, including pilot Lieutenant-General Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, eldest son of Senator Joe Kennedy, who had been grooming him for a run for the US presidency after the war. John F. Kennedy inherited the mantle and duly became US President in 1961.

  On 5 September 1944, any potential German threat from Mimoyecques was finally eliminated when it was overrun and occupied by advancing Canadian troops. Even then, the nature of the site and the Nazi terror weapon it had housed were not conclusively established until after detailed inspections had been made by expert scientists and engineers in November and December of that year.

  The experts concluded that what 617 Squadron had destroyed were fifty subterranean superguns – the largest guns ever seen. Two banks of twenty-five firing tubes, each 127 metres long and inclined upwards at an angle of 50 degrees, were sited 1,000 metres apart. At the deepest level, 100 metres below ground, galleries gave access to the clusters of breech-blocks allowing shells, fitted with steel fins to aid accuracy, to be loaded. Unlike conventional cannons, which were powered by a single explosive charge, each barrel of the supergun was fitted with a series of explosive boosters at intervals along the bore, like a series of interconnected, inverted Ys, that would detonate in sequence to increase the speed of the projectile. Accelerating all the way up the barrel, each shell would burst from it at a speed of 1,500 metres a second, striking London, 165 kilometres away, less than two minutes later.

  Like the First World War ‘Paris Gun’, which was fired at the French capital during the spring of 1918, the V-3 supergun would have been too inaccurate to be effective against purely military targets and was specifically designed for terror attacks on civilian populations. It was capable of firing supersonic shells at a rate of almost 600 an hour, raining down almost 600 tons of high explosive a day on London. Although that daily total of high explosive was modest compared with the thousands of tons being dumped on Germany’s cities by Britain’s Main Force bombers and the USAAF, had the V-3 been used to attack London, the psychological impact on a population still recovering from the Blitz would have been devastating.

  The Nazi forces were in headlong retreat on both Eastern and Western fronts by December 1944, and the threat that they might ever use the supergun had been eliminated, but Churchill still pressed for its complete destruction, fearing that a future enemy – a reborn Germany, the Soviet Union or even France – might one day reinstate it and use it against London.

  The day after VE Day, 8 May 1945, which brought the war in Europe to an end, operating clandestinely to avoid alerting General de Gaulle’s provisional French government, which had been resisting attempts to destroy the site, British Royal Engineers laid explosive charges inside the excavated and accessible parts of the Mimoyecques site. Five days later they laid further charges – a total of thirty-six tonnes of TNT in all – to complete the job, demolishing the upper levels and the concrete and steel carapace covering the site. The Second World War superguns had never been fired.

  * * *

  Led by 617 Squadron, the eighteen-month bombing campaign against the Nazi V-weapon sites and the transport infrastructure surrounding them had first reduced and then virtually eliminated the threat from Hitler’s terror weapons. Sir Arthur Harris was able to claim that ‘instead of an average of 6,000 flying bombs, the enemy was only able to launch an average of 95 a day … judge what a bombardment more than sixty times as heavy would have been like!’6

  One of the last acts of that campaign, the destruction of the Nazi V-3 supergun, proved to be Leonard Cheshire’s final bow with 617 Squadron. He was compulsorily stood down from ops by Air Commodore Ralph Cochrane the next day. The normal tour of duty was thirty ops, and Cheshire had completed a hundred, many of which were the most perilous of all, at extreme low level. He also spent longer than anyone over the target, calling in each bomber in turn onto the markers he had laid. As testament to his courage, he was awarded the VC, the first ever to be awarded for a period of sustained bravery rather than an individual act.

  At the same time as Cheshire was stood down, Cochrane also retired all three of 617’s Flight Commanders: the Australian Dave Shannon, New Zealander Les ‘Happy’ Munro, and the American ‘gentle giant’ Joe McCarthy. Despite his nickname, Munro was definitely not happy about it. He had flown fifty-nine ops and was ‘really disappointed to be stood down. I would have preferred the round figure of sixty ops. I never thought it would have been pressing my luck to go on, I don’t think any of us did. We were all very close-knit and ran a very efficient operation during the Cheshire era. He exuded confidence in his own abilities, in flying, in operations and in running the squadron, and that skill and professionalism filtered down to all of us.’

  Cheshire and the three Flight Commanders were replaced by ‘Three Limeys and a Welshman’: Wing Commander James ‘Willie’ Tait took over as OC of the squadron, while Squadron Leaders Gerry Fawke, Tony Iveson and John Cockshott became Flight Commanders.

  Tony Iveson grew up in York. His father had fought in the Great War and been wounded on the first day of the Somme. Like so many other veterans, he never talked about his experiences, but in the mid-1930s, when the talk of war was growing, he was ‘in despair at the thought that it was all going to happen again’. Iveson had been ‘crazy about flying’ from the age of ten. He and a couple of friends used to save sixpence a week to buy Popular Flying, a magazine started by Captain W. E. Johns, author of the ‘Biggles’ books. Iveson’s father told his son there was no future in flying and wanted him to ‘find a proper career’, but in 1938, aged nineteen, he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve. ‘I was tested the same day as the Munich crisis and I thought: There’s no point in going home, best put on a uniform and get cracking. I wasn’t naive in my expectations, I’d read all the old war books and knew about the horror of being shot down in flames; I’m not sure I thought of honour and defending my country, but I did feel that, unlike previous “political” wars, this one really had to be fought.’7

  By 1940 he was flying Spitfires, but in May of that year he fell ill with appendicitis and ‘was late’ getting into the Battle of Britain. ‘Most of the men I’d been training with were killed,’ he said:

  and I probably would have been too but for my appendicitis. We were so short of pilots in 1940 that there was no time for proper training – you just had to get in and do it. You did some formation flying and aerobatics, you did one or two height climbs to get used to being on oxygen, and that was about all. There were no dual-control Spitfires, so when you got on a squadron, if it was in Action Theatre, you were almost straight in the air.

  Still raw, he joined 616 Squadron in late August 1940 and on 16 September, on patrol over a convoy in the North Sea, he chased down a German Junkers Ju 88. ‘I had been told you had to get in close, but foolishly I got too close,’ he reca
lled. The rear gunner poured fire into Iveson’s Spitfire and he had to ditch in the sea. ‘I don’t think we were ever instructed about ditching, but I remembered vaguely from chat in the crew room that you landed along the waves and not into them.’ As he hit the sea, the Spitfire ‘bounced about and I was thrown around, then she hit again and came to a stop. I stepped out and the plane disappeared.’ He only had a Mae West life-jacket, no dinghy, but he was spotted and picked up by a minesweeper with the convoy. ‘I was incredibly lucky to get out alive,’ he said. ‘I don’t know many others who did after ditching in a Spitfire. That was my first experience of combat, five days after my twenty-first birthday, and it was a real eye-opener.’

  When he got back on dry land, he was taken to Coltishall, where he was simply given an aircraft, which was needed at his base, to fly home:

  That was the welcome back, no medical check-up or anything – just get on with it. I didn’t have a parachute or a helmet, but I flew the Spitfire back to my squadron. It was all very casual, but so was the atmosphere on an operational squadron in those days. Young pilots would arrive and probably no one even knew their names, and often they didn’t come back from their first or second trip.

  After completing his tour with 616 Squadron, Iveson spent two years as a flying instructor in Rhodesia. Still only twenty-one when he arrived there, he mentored eighteen-year-olds who had never even sat in an aeroplane before, and within four weeks he had them flying solo, by both day and night. However, he wanted to play a bigger part in the war effort, and in August 1943 he returned to England.

  He was determined to go back to Fighter Command and protested loudly when he was posted to Bomber Command instead, but his new CO sat him down and told him, ‘Look here, young man, the war has changed. Fighter Command did its stuff in 1940, but now the only Command which is taking the war to the enemy is Bomber Command. We want good pilots, you’re a good pilot and that’s why you have been selected.’ Iveson recalled:

  I hope this doesn’t sound conceited, but although I was new to bombers, flying was second nature to me by then. It must have been very different for a young pilot going to a Main Force squadron and probably taking over a bunk which somebody had disappeared from the night before. A lot of those young guys were still trying to learn to fly – to cope with weather and icing, and the enemy of course – and their first trip might have been Berlin.

  After Iveson completed his training at the Lancaster Finishing School, the chief flying instructor asked him if he would like to apply to 617 Squadron. He didn’t need to be asked twice:

  617 was something special. It had a reputation as the premier squadron, though some said it was a suicide squadron because of the losses on the dams. It was a big thing to be chosen. I couldn’t believe it, I was very proud. The day I arrived at Scampton my Flight Commander looked me up and down and said, ‘Christ, a sprog like you, never done a bomb op in your life; they’ll have you for breakfast.’

  They nearly did, one day later. ‘There was no messing about on 617,’ Iveson said:

  Not like Main Force, where they had to take care of COs and Flight Commanders. If there was an operation on 617, everyone went. We had the advantage over the Army of not seeing people being shot, mutilated, blown to bits alongside us, coughing their guts out. So someone being missing was not too dissimilar to someone being posted. You’d come back from leave and find that two crews had been posted or you’d get back from a trip to find your friend had ‘bought it’. We didn’t talk about it, we’d just say, ‘Poor old Joe got the chop’ or ‘Another one’s gone for a burton.’ We certainly didn’t do what they did in the film Battle of Britain – put a wreath in front of the Mess table – there was none of that sentimental nonsense. It was accepted as part of life at the time. To go on a series of operations and not expect anyone to get into any kind of trouble would have been stupid.

  On ops, Iveson tried to keep his focus solely on the task in hand:

  On the bombing run, I would always put the seat down and concentrate on the instruments and let other people look out. I was watching my six instruments and that little extra one we had for the SABS bombsight which gave us our direction. I was trying to ignore what was going on outside and get on with the job. I felt that I had a responsibility to myself and the squadron to do as good a job as possible, but as the skipper, I also had a responsibility for the crew: to get them there and back safely. You expected flak over a target and it was much preferable to fighters. You knew you had to fly through it and there was nothing you could do – you couldn’t take avoiding action if you were going to do a good bombing run – so it was pointless worrying about it.

  When off duty they used to go out together as a crew, and Iveson remembered an army colonel being ‘very surprised’ when his sergeant used his first name to ask, ‘Would you like another pint, Tony?’ Iveson said to the colonel, ‘We’re a crew. We fly together, we know each other and we depend on each other. On the station and in the air it’s different – more formal – but here we’re off duty.’

  While Iveson and the other new commanders were settling in, Nick Knilans and his flight engineer, Ken Ryall, were flight-testing aircraft. Some were new, others had been patched up after taking battle damage. The two men usually flew without any other crew, though they did not entirely lack for company since, as Knilans said, ‘several times we took along a friendly WAAF. [Flying Officer] Phil [Ingelby] and I took turns flying and wooing. After all, the RAF had supplied the Lancaster with a couch!’ He was referring to the rest bed fitted in some Lancasters.

  * * *

  Amidst the frivolities of RAF life, 617 Squadron continued to target the V-weapon sites, including the enormous concrete blockhouse and tunnel at Watten, where V-2s were to be assembled and stored. The world’s first ICBMs, V-2s were liquid-fuelled and, travelling at four times the speed of sound, would climb to a height of 75 miles before plunging down onto London and the south-east at supersonic speed. Even New York was thought to be within the V-2’s potential range. Unlike the V-1 ‘doodlebugs’, there was no audible warning of a V-2 strike at all, as they flashed down from the skies much faster than sound could travel. The first, launched on 8 September 1944, killed three people in Chiswick: an elderly lady, a three-year-old girl and a sapper on leave from the Royal Engineers. Between then and 27 March 1945, when the last V-2 struck London, they were to kill 2,751 people in the capital alone.

  Don Cheney, who was on leave, had a ringside seat as one of the first landed near the train on which he was travelling. ‘There was a terrific explosion,’ he says, ‘and you could feel the shockwave pulse over the area. I didn’t see it, but I could certainly feel it!’

  Barbara McNally lived in a pub in Camberwell that suffered a direct hit. They did not use the air-raid shelter in their street, preferring to use the pub cellar, where they pushed their beds together so that the two children, their aunt and their parents could all sleep in relative safety. Or so they thought.

  The bomb blew out the side walls and the building collapsed onto us. Luckily one of the girders in the roof of the cellar created a small space above us to stop us all being killed. My dad was the only casualty, as the till from the bar above fell on his head and he was very bloody and unconscious. I remember my mum and aunty both crying and praying and shouting for help. I thought I would help by pushing all this debris that was in front of me out of the way. That nearly brought the house down, literally. I don’t know how long we were down there but eventually the emergency services heard our shouts and we were pulled out more or less feet-first and put in the shelter in the street.8

  One of the most horrific V-2 attacks came on 25 November 1944 when a rocket hit a crowded Woolworth’s store in south-east London. Witnesses described the store bulging outwards and then imploding in a blinding flash of light and an enormous roar. People several hundred yards away felt the heat of the blast on their faces. The Co-Op store next door also collapsed, killing more customers inside. The bodies of passers-by were flung g
reat distances, and an army lorry overturned, killing its occupants. A double-decker bus was spun round, causing more death and injury; the passengers could be seen still sitting in their seats, covered in dust.

  Only piles of masonry and body-parts remained where Woolworth’s had once stood. It was to take three days to clear the debris and retrieve all the bodies. In the carnage 168 people had been killed and 121 seriously injured.9

  * * *

  The Watten V-2 site also housed a huge reinforced-concrete factory for producing liquid oxygen, almost five tons of which were needed to launch each rocket. Although the Watten site, protected by a 16-foot concrete roof, was not completely destroyed, repeated attacks on the site itself by 617 Squadron using Tallboys, and on the surrounding road and rail tracks by USAAF bombers with conventional bombs, disrupted production and threatened a catastrophic explosion of the liquid oxygen compressors and tanks, forcing the Germans to abandon the site for another V-2 assembly and launch bunker in a disused quarry outside the village of Wizernes, near St-Omer.

  Set into the quarry-face, the site was capable of handling rockets of up to twice the V-2’s 50-foot length. Air reconnaissance had first detected construction at Wizernes as far back as August 1943, and by January 1944 an elaborate system of camouflage had been installed on the hilltop in an attempt to conceal the site and its underground facilities. The Wizernes site was protected by a huge concrete dome, a cupola 16 feet thick, 230 feet in diameter, and weighing 5,500 tons. A bomb-proof ferroconcrete ‘skirt’ supported by a series of buttresses extended beyond the dome, giving added protection, and dispersal tunnels protected by enormous blast-proof doors led to a series of concealed launching sites, each about the size of a tennis court, scattered through the surrounding countryside.