by John Nichol
Another 617 crewman saw ‘several unfortunate incidents where a stick of bombs from one of our aircraft hit another, which peeled over and then collided with another Lancaster. It was terrible, there were bodies tumbling through the sky. Nowadays it’s called “friendly fire” – we had a lot of that on daylight raids.’7
Colin Cole
Wireless Operator Colin Cole’s Lancaster was another victim of ‘friendly bombing’:
A strange article smashed through the window of the Lanc and hit the wireless equipment. It fractured the hydraulic oil pipe and I got smothered in oil. There was smoke and a terrible burning smell – it was an incendiary bomb dropped by another aircraft above us! We were just so lucky it didn’t ignite or that would have been the end of us all. Imagine that, surviving the German onslaught and then dying at the hands of your own mates! I was in hospital for about a week after that because I lost the sight in my eyes, but as soon as I was fit, I was sent up flying again.
Rilly-la-Montagne proved to be 617 Squadron’s final attack on a V-weapon site, because as Allied troops pushed ever further eastwards, they eventually overran them. Examination of the captured sites by intelligence officers revealed just how devastating 617’s precision bombing with Tallboys had been. Despite their massive reinforced-concrete roofs, with the assembly and launch sites buried deep underground, the V-weapon sites at Watten, Wizernes, Creil, Rilly-la-Montagne, Siracourt and Mimoyecques had all been devastated, their underground chambers, tunnels and galleries collapsed by the earth tremors generated by the exploding Tallboys.
CHAPTER 10
Life and Death on 617 Squadron
While 617 Squadron were working to eradicate the V-weapon threat, a plot to eradicate the greatest threat of all was narrowly failing. On 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a bomb hidden in his briefcase under the table of the briefing room at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair), Hitler’s military headquarters on the Eastern Front. Von Stauffenberg then left the room, but when the bomb detonated, although four men in the room died and most of the others were wounded, Hitler was shielded from the blast by the thick leg of the solid oak table, and escaped unscathed. The conspirators were rounded up and von Stauffenberg was executed by firing squad the same night. Eight other conspirators, including his elder brother, suffered a much more agonising fate after being repeatedly half-strangled with a wire garrotte and then resuscitated before they were allowed to die. The grisly events were filmed for Hitler’s entertainment.
Elsewhere Allied advances continued, with Soviet forces liberating Majdanek concentration camp on 24 July and Florence liberated on 4 August 1944. A few days earlier, on 26 July, a German Me 262 fighter became the first jet-engined aircraft to shoot down an enemy when an RAF Mosquito – previously one of the fastest aircraft in the skies, but now a helpless victim of the super-fast turbojet – was hit by the Messerschmitt’s guns and forced to crash-land.
With the V-weapon threat to London largely eliminated, 617’s next series of targets were mainly naval ones, principally the havens of the U- and E-boats still threatening the Allied ships supplying the invasion forces in France. However, so many Tallboys had been used against the V-sites that stocks had been exhausted. British factories were only producing seven Tallboys a week, and though American factories were turning out four times as many, shipping delays and losses to U-boats led to shortages. As a result, the raid by 617 Squadron on a bridge at Etaples on 4 August saw each Lancaster carrying twelve 1,000-pound bombs, and though the area surrounding the bridge was peppered with bomb-craters and several direct hits were recorded, the bridge still stood.
Back at the Petwood after the raid, the crews helped themselves to tea and biscuits and fought for one of the two copies of the day’s Daily Mirror – highly prized for its pin-up picture on the centre pages and the cartoon adventures of the even more scantily clad Jane. The aircrews whiled away the time until dinner smoking and chatting, playing cards, darts or billiards or strolling in the grounds, then congregated in the bar for a pre-dinner drink. A couple of days earlier, Canadian pilot Don Cheney had enjoyed a ‘rousing crew party’ in the Mess for three newly commissioned Pilot Officers in which their brand-new officers’ dress hats had been filled with beer and then stamped on repeatedly to signify that the officers were now ‘fully operational’.
But on 4 August 1944, with an op scheduled for the following morning, there were no such raucous scenes for Don and his crew, nor any prospect of a run out to the Red Lion at Stickford or one of the other local pubs. The aircrew ate their dinner of ‘steak’ pie – actually horse meat – sprouts, mashed potatoes and gravy, and the inevitable steamed pudding with custard, and then, after a couple more beers, most of them were in bed before ten o’clock, knowing that they would be woken at four-thirty the next morning.
It was a gentle awakening, with a young WAAF bringing them tea and biscuits. They washed and shaved and put on their battledress, making sure to empty their pockets of all items, even letters, ticket stubs or banknotes, that might prove useful to the enemy if they were shot down. However, one aircrew member used to slip a small German dictionary in his pocket – ‘Come in handy in the Stalag’ was his only comment.1 They ate the traditional pre-op breakfast of bacon and fried eggs with fruit juice, toast and coffee, and then boarded the crew buses for the short journey to the airfield.
The briefing that morning of 5 August 1944 revealed the target for the day. Sufficient Tallboys, fitted with special hand-tempered noses, had now been delivered for a daylight attack to be launched on the formidable hardened U-boat pens at Brest. In addition to the usual flak and ground fire, and the fear of fighter attacks, there was an added hazard in attacking Brest: the naval guns sited around the harbour, which sent up heavy shells that exploded with a deafening ‘Boom!’
The intelligence officer told them that squadrons of USAAF Lockheed Lightnings and RAF Spitfires would be providing air cover and that latest reports indicated that there were about seventy 88mm anti-aircraft guns around the U-boat pens, only a handful of which were radar-guided. Even by the standards of Military Intelligence, this turned out to be a very optimistic assessment. French Resistance sources claimed the defences included 175 88mm guns, almost all of which were radar-guided. With the warnings of heavy opposition fresh in their ears, the crews headed to the aircraft.
‘The worst part of any op was sitting on the grass by your aircraft waiting for the green Very light to set you going,’ pilot Lawrence ‘Benny’ Goodman remembers:
That was the time I’d often think about what was to come, what we were about to do and about to face. There was nothing else to occupy your mind, so perhaps you might dwell on your immediate future, but the crew certainly never spoke about it or expressed any personal fears. As the captain, I would have stopped them if they had. I’m sure we all must have been apprehensive at times, but you couldn’t let that feeling pervade the crew.
All Londoner Goodman had ever wanted to do was be a pilot. ‘I didn’t have any real notion of fighting,’ he says, ‘what I’d do or be involved in, I just wanted to fly.’ He was afraid he’d be rejected as a pilot because his eyesight was less than 20/20, so when he went for his eye test he took the precaution of learning the bottom line of the chart on his way in. He reeled it off and passed the test.
Benny Goodman and crew
Goodman volunteered for the RAF just after the start of the war in 1939, but it was over a year before he was called up.
I was only eighteen, but when I said I was going to join up, my father quietly encouraged me. He had served as a soldier in the First World War on the Eastern Front where the Turks and Bulgarians were fighting. He’d served from the start to the end, and been wounded in action, but he didn’t really talk about the war other than to say it was tough fighting; very few prisoners were taken out there. When I told my mother I was joining up – Oh heavens! I was an only child and she did not want me to go at all, probably like all mothers at the time.
I�
��d seen the results of the German bombing – one night a bomb hit the buildings next door to our block of flats. It blew the place to smithereens and we had to evacuate down the fire escape. I still remember slipping on a piece of flesh at the bottom of the steps; I’ve never forgotten that.
I joined up because I thought it was the right thing to do in the circumstances. Everyone else was joining, so I didn’t want to be the only one not ‘doing my bit’. I just thought it was going to be a great adventure … boy, did I get that wrong! I got into a bit of trouble during training, wacky flypasts and a few other antics, so I just burst out laughing when they told me I was posted to the famous 617 Squadron. I stopped laughing when I realised they were serious.
But my first time under fire was a real eye-opener. I could actually smell the flak! My wireless op was hit in his boot by a piece of shrapnel, and my bomb-aimer had a piece of cockpit above his head blasted away as a chunk came through it, missing him by inches. We also had an engine shot up, but boy, oh boy, could those Merlins take a battering. They gave such a beautiful roar when you pumped them up; there was no other sound like it in the world. They saved my life on more than one occasion.
Goodman would rely heavily on his aircraft, and his skills, as the days wore on.
The aircrews were to start their engines at nine o’clock, with all aircraft due to be airborne by half past. As they rumbled down the taxiway and queued at the end of the runway ready for take-off, the gunners were making last-minute checks, swinging their turrets from side to side and raising and lowering their gun barrels; if there were problems, it was as well to know of them now rather than when a German fighter had them in its sights.
Don Cheney’s aircraft was fourth in line for take-off. His crew had extended their tour past thirty ops and were now up to an official total of thirty-nine. ‘I actually counted it as forty,’ he says, ‘but the RAF didn’t count Operation Taxable on D-Day as an op, as we hadn’t been over enemy territory!’ Unlike several other crews, Cheney’s crew practised regular bale-out drills while safely on the ground, but he never imagined it would happen for real. It was rare for any aircrew to talk about being shot down, even though they knew that the possibility was always there and what the odds were.
Few aircrew had rehearsed escape and evasion techniques either, even though, back in July, Leonard Cheshire had decided that all his aircrews should practise escaping from the enemy by making their way back to base after being dumped in the countryside some miles away. Cheshire ordered them to assemble wearing their battledress and flying boots. He told them that the police had been instructed to arrest any airmen they came across, and then, after confiscating their caps and any money they had, he put them all on a bus with blacked-out windows. After a long ride involving many twists, turns and changes of direction to disorient them, groups of two or three men were dropped off at intervals.
Les Munro and David Wilson decided that their drop-off point was roughly due east of Woodhall Spa and took the first west-bound road they came across. Nightfall and the descent of a typical Lincolnshire ‘pea-souper’ didn’t help their navigation, but they ploughed on, circling through the fields to avoid a village where a patrolling policeman was obviously on the lookout for stray aircrew. Soaked to the skin, exhausted, and with blistered feet from the route march in flying boots, they eventually stumbled up the drive to the Petwood to find the place in darkness. Munro remembers feeling ‘a bit peeved’ that there was not even a welcoming committee to congratulate them for having made it.2
Others found a rather easier route home. Nick Knilans, his navigator, Harry Geller, and his wireless operator, Les Knell, were deposited in a narrow lane next to a small canal in a flat, featureless stretch of countryside, devoid of houses or buildings of any sort. As the bus disappeared from sight, Knilans turned to Geller and said, ‘Well, Harry, where the hell are we?’
‘Beats me, Skipper,’ he said, ‘without my Gee box and maps, I’m as lost as you are.’ They followed the canal in what they hoped was the right direction until they came to a promising-looking road, and were wandering along it when they saw a car approaching. Fearing it was the police, they were about to sprint off across the fields when the smiling driver, one of Knilans’ former comrades on 9 Squadron, stuck his head out of the window and said, ‘What are you up to, Nicky?’
He offered them a lift to Boston and they all jumped in. ‘Just drop us off at the White Horse Inn,’ Knilans said. Having established with the barmaid that their credit was good, they remained in the pub till closing time and then borrowed the money for their bus fare back to the base. They were a mile or so from safety when uniformed local police flagged them down. Luckily, because of the blackout there were no lights on the bus, and by the time the policemen had boarded it and shone their flashlights towards the back, the three airmen had jumped out of the back door and disappeared into the night. They walked the last mile back to the Petwood and had gone to bed long before Les Munro and the rest of their comrades, including Don Cheney, came straggling in, having had a far less enjoyable escape-and-evasion exercise.
When Don Cheney had first started on ops, ‘thinking I was a bit of a tough guy, I used to take a long cheese knife tucked in my flying boot as some sort of protection if I ever ended up shot down and on the ground, facing the enemy, and needed to defend myself or aid my escape. But after a couple of trips, I decided it might be better not to be carrying a knife if I ended up surrounded by armed Germans!’ Cheney wasn’t particularly superstitious and never took any lucky charms with him, as some pilots did – Mick Martin always carried a small toy koala bear – but 5 August 1944 would have been a good day to start, because Cheney was going to need a lot of luck to survive.
As the third aircraft began accelerating down the runway that morning, Cheney was already swinging his Lancaster, V-Victor, onto the apron of the runway, stopping at the white hash marks at the start point. As the previous Lancaster lumbered into the sky and banked around to port, Cheney eased the throttles forward, ‘holding the straining V-Victor against the brakes with my toes pressing hard on the tops of the rudder pedals’. He released the brakes and, with the throttles against the stops, the Lancaster hurtled down the runway, the nose wheel glued to the white centreline as the flight engineer called out the rising airspeed. Cheney could feel the aircraft straining to lift off despite its massive load, but waited until the airspeed reached 130 knots before easing back on the yoke. The Lancaster rose smoothly from the tarmac, and Cheney banked to port and began the long climb to the bombing altitude of 17,500 feet.
They crossed the south coast near Beachy Head, altered course to clear Cherbourg and swung in over the north coast of Brittany, where they rendezvoused with the USAAF Lockheed Lightnings. It was a clear, sunny day as the raiders flew on across the Brittany peninsula on a course that left the Germans guessing until the last minute about which of three potential targets they were making for. As they reached their final turning point for the attack, there had been no enemy activity at all – no fighters nor even any flak. It was, thought Cheney, going to be ‘a piece of cake. We would lay our Tallboys right on the button.’
They switched course abruptly, heading for Brest, leaving the defenders little time to ignite their smokescreen. However, they were now flying at a precisely assigned altitude and speed, straight and level for 18 miles. The Germans knew the Lancasters’ altitude and course and exactly where they were heading and put up a wall of flak so dense that, says Cheney, ‘I’d never seen anything like it.’
The smoke markers dropped by Willie Tait from 4,500 feet fell into the water of the harbour and were ‘rendered useless’, but nonetheless, in near-perfect visibility, the bomb-aimers of the twelve aircraft that reached Brest acquired the target visually, and half a dozen of them obtained direct hits from three and a half miles above the target, though they had to fly through a blizzard of flak to do so.
Normally, flak pinged off the side of the aircraft, rattling like stones against a corrugated-iron
shed. This time was very different. Don Cheney was in the final stages of his bomb-run, just seconds from releasing the bomb and listening to the calm, clear voice of his bomb-aimer Len Curtis talking him in to the aiming point, when the flight engineer nudged him in the ribs and gestured at the sky ahead of them. Still with his eyes glued to the instrument panel, Cheney could see in his peripheral vision an intense barrage of flak exploding in front of them and knew that they were just going to have to fly through the centre of it. ‘It was radar-predicted, so the gunners knew exactly which piece of sky we were heading for,’ he says, ‘but as we were on the bomb-run, there was nothing to do but hope and pray as we headed towards it. I said, “Hang on guys, it looks a little dirty ahead.”’
Puffs of grey smoke from the flak bursts drifted past on either side, the shell bursts so close that he could hear the muffled boom and glimpse their fiery red centres. Suddenly ‘there was a real clang as we were hit,’ he says, and then another and another – five or six in all. He heard cries of pain over the intercom and knew it was bad. The clang was from flak hitting the bomb – ‘How it didn’t go off still amazes me.’ The aircraft filled with clouds of blue cordite smoke as it shuddered under the impact of two more direct hits. Yet more flak then erupted around them and there was another cry over the intercom, followed by Curtis’s calmer voice saying, ‘Bomb gone!’
Cheney at once banked the aircraft to port, pushing forward on the column to dive and increase speed, the fastest way to escape the danger, but the flak damage already looked fatal. Both gunners, bomb-aimer Len Curtis and flight engineer Jim Rosher were unhurt, but wireless operator Reg Pool was seriously wounded, slumped in his seat, eyes wide and skin very pale. Navigator Roy Welch was also badly wounded and unable to speak, though he managed to scrawl the course heading that Cheney should follow on a scrap of paper and held it out to him.
