After the Flood

by John Nichol

  Tait’s bomb-aimer, Walter ‘Danny’ Daniels, squinted into his bombsight and the aircraft jumped as the bomb dropped away. He watched it enter the water towards the left-hand end of the barrage and sink like a stone as planned. Tait slammed the throttles forward and heard his rear gunner open fire as they passed over the barrage.

  As they swept away on a starboard curve, one of Tait’s crew thought he ‘saw the kite immediately behind us burst into flames, go into an uncontrolled dive and explode on the ground’. In fact, Drew Wyness, following his leader in, found flak flying all around him, ‘the most frightening barrage of light and medium flak that we have ever seen during the war’.10 Flying at low level, in broad daylight, the Lancaster was an easy target as, ignoring the efforts of the Mustangs to distract them, German gunners poured shells and bullets into it.

  Hit repeatedly and streaming smoke, Wyness’s Lancaster burst into flames before reaching its bombing point, and though the Tallboy was released, the aircraft was now almost uncontrollable. It hit the high-tension power cables leading from the barrage, causing huge blue flashes as the cables shorted. Then, shortly after hitting the water near the bank of the Rhine, the aircraft exploded, leading Willie Tait’s crew to believe that every man on board had died at once.

  Kembs barrage under attack

  The remaining raiders also met murderous fire as they targeted the Kembs barrage. John Cockshott’s Lancaster hit the slipstream of the previous aircraft and his Tallboy fell wide. Australian pilot Jack ‘Slapsie’ Sayers made two runs, but as he opened his bomb doors on the second one, either his Tallboy had been inadequately secured in the bomb-bay, or an electrical fault had caused it to release prematurely, because it tumbled straight out of the bomb doors as they were opened, buckling one of them. The bomb fell to earth and landed in soft ground without detonating. It was retrieved intact by the Germans, giving them another chance to examine the construction of this new British super-weapon.

  Sayers had earned his unusual nickname after an incident when, seeing a drunken man and his friend beating up a woman, he intervened and knocked out both of them. He then beat a hasty retreat after the woman took a fancy to him. His mates christened him Slapsie after a ferocious puncher, the light-heavyweight boxing champion ‘Slapsie Maxie’ Rosenbloom.11

  The next pilots to attack the target, Christopher ‘Kit’ Howard and Phil Martin, misjudged their approaches and banked around to make another run. Howard’s decision to go round again, ignoring Willie Tait’s instruction ‘Kit! Abandon, abandon!’,12 proved a fatal error. The German gunners had watched the heavy-laden Lancasters slowly circling and unleashed a blizzard of fire as Howard began his run. His starboard fuel tanks were ruptured and the plane burst into flame. Still raked by cannon fire, he veered away to starboard and moments later the aircraft exploded as it hit the ground near the village of Efringen-Kirchen, just inside Germany. Howard, whose elder brother had already been killed in action, was from one of Britain’s oldest aristocratic families and had been heir to the estate of Castle Howard in Yorkshire.13

  Flying 400 yards behind him, Phil Martin’s gunner saw Howard’s aircraft explode. ‘This made me very angry,’ he said. ‘I opened up my guns and gave them everything I had. I can remember seeing the tracer bullets going into the defences with men running about.’14 As their bomb-aimer called ‘Bomb gone!’ the aircraft shuddered when it too was hit by flak, damaging the rudders. Had a Mustang not flown directly underneath him, engaging the anti-aircraft guns and distracting attention from the Lancaster for a few crucial seconds, Martin too might well have been shot down. As it was, he escaped the guns, but his bomb overshot by 50 yards. Struggling to control his turn, Martin then found himself flying through a balloon barrage. His mid-upper gunner asked if he could have a go at them, but was immediately told, ‘No! They’re Swiss!’

  They missed the balloons, but Martin was getting no response from the rudder and their chances of returning safely to England did not look bright until the flight engineer made his way to the back, wrapped the severed rudder wire around the handle of his fire axe and used it as a rudimentary rudder control. When they landed safely back in Woodhall Spa, they counted 106 flak holes in their aircraft.

  Tait had climbed to 8,000 feet, but then, as was his habit, he decided to go around once more to see if any of the others had scored hits. While doing this, forgetting his own warning to his men, he flew straight over the powerhouse, which was defended by two four-gun batteries of light flak. ‘In a few seconds they were on us and followed us all over the sky until we went out of range.’ Despite having one tyre shot away, a 40mm flak shell lodged in his wing and his main fuel tank ‘leaking like a colander’, Tait made a safe landing back at Woodhall Spa.15

  As the battered Lancasters were flying home, a Mosquito from 627 Squadron made two runs over the target to photograph the results as the delay-fused Tallboys detonated. Several exploded harmlessly, but on their first run they saw one bomb burst some 200 yards south of the west end of the barrage, soon followed by another ‘which appeared to blow out the westerly span. Water started to pour through the gap and there were ripples extending 200–250 yards upstream.’

  Tait’s bomb had come to rest against the left-hand sluice gate and when it and Jimmy Castagnola’s bombs exploded, they demolished the gate and the iron superstructure above the first and second pillars on the barrage’s west side, unleashing a wall of water that emptied the dam, flooding the lower Rhine valley and causing the water upstream to fall dramatically. The Swiss newspaper National-Zeitung reported: ‘The breaching of the Kembs Dam has lowered the water level in the Rhine basin at Basle, necessitating the transfer of boats from the first basin to the second. At 2100 hours the level of the Rhine fell by three to three and a half metres. Below Kembs the water released is estimated at millions of cubic metres and has apparently caused flooding everywhere, for the German authorities have given the water alarm.’

  * * *

  The repercussions of the attack were far from over. On 9 October Willie Tait, still presuming that Drew Wyness’s crew had all perished when he saw their Lancaster explode, sent a letter to Bruce Hosie’s mother in New Zealand expressing his deepest sympathy for her loss. ‘I know you would prefer me to be frank with you,’ he wrote. ‘I think that all the crew must have been killed instantly.’16 In fact and miraculously, Hosie and his crew all survived the impact after Wyness managed to ditch his Lancaster in the Rhine, coming to rest in shallow water near the western bank, close to the Franco-German border town of Chalampe.

  Bruce Hosie

  Two of the crew ran along the wing, jumped on to the riverbank and made off into the woods flanking the river, while the other five inflated their dinghy and began paddling downstream. The burning aircraft they had left exploded after they were clear.

  When they saw the Germans launching a boat to intercept them, one of the five men dived overboard, swam to the bank and made for the woods, but the other four remained in the dinghy and were captured. They were taken to the nearby town of Rheinweiler, where the local Nazi chief, Kreisleiter Hugo Grüner, took charge of them. Unknown to the airmen, since August 1943, Nazi leaders, furious at the impact of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, had been giving tacit encouragement, and sometimes direct orders, for reprisals against captured British and American Terrorflieger, ‘terror flyers’ – ‘lynch law should be the rule’. Even without such official directives, aircrew baling out were often at risk: in the course of the war, 350 aircrew were butchered by civilians furious at the bombing they had endured.

  The Gauleiter of the Baden and Alsace region in which they had crash-landed had then issued a specific order that Allied airmen captured in the region were to be killed. His subordinate, Grüner, did not disobey. Two at a time, he took Wyness and his crewmates to a deserted stretch of the Rhine a little further downstream and executed them.17

  Captured after the war, he confessed that ‘I murdered them by firing a machine-gun salvo at each of them in
the back, after which each airman was dragged by the feet and thrown into the Rhine.’ Their bodies were later discovered miles downstream. Among them were those of Wyness himself and the New Zealander Bruce Hosie, who had joined the crew only at the last moment. Hosie, the man who had spun a coin with another wireless operator to see who would fill the seat in Wyness’s aircraft, had lost the toss and, with it, his life. The three crew members who had escaped into the woods did not fare any better. They were never seen again and it is believed that they were also summarily executed and buried in unmarked graves. Grüner escaped from American custody in 1947 and though convicted in absentia of murder, he was never recaptured.18 Hosie’s great-nephew says the family ‘never really got over his death … ANZAC Day is always a pretty emotional day around home for lots of reasons, Bruce being one.’19

  * * *

  Tait’s bomb-aimer was awarded ‘an immediate DFC’ for destroying the barrage and Phil Martin an immediate Bar to his DFC. Four other men who had taken part in the raid, including two more of Willie Tait’s crew, received the DFC, but there was no medal for their deceased comrade, Kit Howard, who had flown sixty ops without being awarded any decoration. Some of his comrades tried to get him a posthumous medal, but in the event, no award was ever made.

  Tony Iveson felt the loss of Drew Wyness particularly keenly. ‘We had become mates. He was tall, fair-haired, full of beans and probably one of the best-looking young men I ever knew. His great interest was women! He would chat up almost any girl – I have often wondered if there was something inside him that said, “Get on with this, enjoy it, because you are not going to be around long.”’ Iveson had the sad task of telling their mutual friend, the army officer Chris Melville, whom they’d lunched with the day before, that Drew would no longer be joining them for their prearranged drinks. ‘When I told him, this rugged tough guy, who’d played rugby for Scotland, just sat there with tears running down his cheeks.’

  Looking back on the raid years later, Willie Tait felt that the whole plan had been ‘too complicated. The high-level force did not divert the flak, it alerted them. Likewise the fighters. It would have been better to have two or four aeroplanes on the low-level and nothing else. We would probably have slipped in without anyone being alerted.’20

  * * *

  The Kembs barrage operation never attained the fame of the Dams raid, but it was no less difficult and dangerous. The threat to advancing American forces had now been nullified, but once more, 617 Squadron’s men had paid a heavy price for their success, losing fifteen of their comrades.

  CHAPTER 13

  Back to the Tirpitz

  The Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord, 1944

  The attention of 617 Squadron’s crews now returned to the Tirpitz, still lurking in the icy waters of Tromsø Fjord. In preparation for the attack at maximum range, ground crews worked frantically to replace all the Lancasters’ engines with newer and more powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin 24s, paddle-blade propellers and long-range fuel tanks. In the place where the rest bed and oxygen bottles normally stood, ground crews fitted a Wellington fuel tank with a Mosquito fuel tank secured on top. Fuelling these additional tanks was so hazardous that the ground crews were made to wear plimsolls rather than boots, because ‘one spark could have blown up the aircraft and probably the ones to either side of it as well’.1 Even though all the fuel joints had been tightened and there were no visible signs of any leaks, there was still a pungent enough smell of 100-octane fuel inside the aircraft to make several crewmen feel queasy. It was also ‘like flying a giant fuel tank’, which flight engineer Frank Tilley, with commendable understatement, described as ‘a bit worrying’.2

  Although ‘Joppy’ Joplin’s crew, including Tilley, had flown their first op, a raid on Brest, on 27 August 1944, their inexperience had obliged them to sit out the first attack on the Tirpitz. Now they were to join their comrades in the second attack. Every scrap of excess weight was removed from their aircraft, including the armour plating protecting the pilot’s seat. The mid-upper gun turret was completely removed, the guns were taken out of the front turret, and the ammunition for the rear guns – the Lancaster’s only remaining defensive armament – was reduced to just 500 rounds.

  On 28 October 1944, after receiving a favourable weather forecast, twenty 617 Squadron aircraft, once more augmented by a similar force of Lancasters from 9 Squadron, took off. By now, bomb-aimer Keith ‘Aspro’ Astbury had finished his tour of duty with 617 Squadron and been posted to the Air Ministry in London, but he found his duties so excruciatingly boring that when a fellow Australian, Arthur Kell, told him his bomb-aimer had fallen ill and could not make the Tirpitz op, Aspro wrote himself a forty-eight-hour pass and caught the next train north. By the time the Station Commander at Woodhall Spa, Group Captain ‘Monty’ Philpott, found out that Aspro had no authority even to be there, let alone to be going on an op, he was already airborne.

  Half of 617’s Lancasters landed at Lossiemouth, the remainder at Milltown, while 9 Squadron used Kinloss. After refuelling and final briefing, they planned to take off again at 1 a.m. the following morning, 29 October, but not before a few of the more enterprising souls had managed to scout around the base. Pilot Lawrence ‘Benny’ Goodman met ‘a very pretty young WAAF a few hours before take-off’, he recalls, smiling at the memory. ‘It was very dark, and as I went around a hangar I literally bumped into her and nearly knocked her over. We started chatting and I asked her if she’d like to meet up again. I explained I wouldn’t be free that night as I had to go flying, but perhaps we could meet up the next day? She said she’d love to, so I went off with a skip in my step to prepare for the op.’

  Benny clambered aboard his aircraft knowing the length of the return flight would put the strongest bladder to the test – luckily, the WAAFs from the Mess at Lossiemouth had thoughtfully provided each crewman with an empty milk bottle to pee in. He waited to take off on another miserable night – ‘it was pitch black with a low cloud base and rain hammering down’. As Tony Iveson turned onto the runway and wound up his engines for take-off, such was the massive load they were carrying – around 68,000 pounds – that to get airborne he had to push the throttles ‘through the gate’ – right to the maximum – which ‘could ruin an engine quickly, but we had to do it because of the load’. However, as they rumbled down the runway, one of his port engines failed to reach full power, and only quick action by his flight engineer, who pulled back on a starboard throttle, balanced the aircraft as it took off.

  Struggling to get airborne, only inches off the ground, they were heading straight for Benny Goodman’s Lancaster, lined up on the peri-track awaiting his turn to take off. The two aircraft, brimful of fuel and each carrying a 12,000-pound Tallboy bomb, were now only seconds from a devastating collision. Goodman ‘had my head inside the cockpit doing checks, and suddenly Jock, my flight engineer, nudged me hard in the ribs and said, “Look!” I looked up and saw a bloody great undercarriage heading straight for us. It looked like it was coming straight through the cockpit. I confess I ducked!’ A split-second later, Iveson’s Lancaster roared overhead, missing the other aircraft by inches. Soon after, Goodman himself ‘lined up and took off, nerves over, forget it!’

  Part of the flight was over neutral Sweden. There was no blackout there and Frank Tilley found looking at all the lights of the towns ‘amazing, as I’d not seen that before. A little flak came up but I had the impression they weren’t really trying to hit us. Just a gesture really.’ As they flew on, he found the mountains ‘a beautiful sight – snow-capped, serene and peaceful. Quite a contrast between the scene unfolding before us and what we were actually there to do: destroy a ship and kill people.’3

  At these latitudes in late October, the sun remained low in the sky all day and the dawn produced only a gradual strengthening of the light. One Australian rear gunner was watching as ‘the daylight struggled through the darkness, making an eerie break to the day,’ but as he peered into the lightening sky to the east, he jolte
d upright. Just forward of the starboard beam and flying on an exact reciprocal course was a German transport aircraft:

  a lumbering old Ju 52, tiredly staggering its way southward towards Germany, those within probably eagerly anticipating the coming leave and certainly not expecting to see enemy aircraft heading towards the North Pole! We were not spotted. If we had been, none of us would have come back to Lossiemouth that night, the fighters would have made sure of that. That is why I did not fire at a target which looked close enough to reach out and touch!4

  The sun rose above the horizon, ‘tinting all the mountain tops pink, just like a wedding cake’,5 but they could see banks of cloud ahead of them. The weather over Tromsø had been predicted to be fine and clear, but as the Lancasters approached they found that cloud cover streaming in from the sea was obscuring the target. Nonetheless, they pressed home the attack through a blizzard of anti-aircraft fire. As usual, wireless operator Sydney Grimes was standing up in the astrodome of his aircraft, watching the action:

  We’d come a long way to hit the ship and I wanted to see what she looked like! I could see the flak coming up and exploding. The heavy fifteen-inch guns could reach us quite far out, so it was like flying into the side of a house. It was a huge explosion but luckily they hadn’t got the height quite right, so they were exploding beneath us. It was quite strange watching these massive blasts; they were almost beautiful, but if one of those had got near, we’d have been dead.