After the Flood

by John Nichol

  Grimes came from Great Wakering, near Southend. His father was a Thames bargeman who during the First World War had ferried supplies of ammunition from Woolwich Arsenal across the Channel to Saint-Valéry, near Dieppe. When war broke out, Sydney, then seventeen, was working as a clerk in E. K. Cole’s radio factory – it later adopted the brand name EKCO and made the radios that Sydney now used as a wireless operator in the RAF. During the Battle of Britain, he and his friends had watched dogfights taking place over the Thames estuary. ‘We saw aircraft shot down and then cycled as close as possible to the site, to see what it was like.’ From the train between Southend and Fenchurch Street in London, he had also had a close-up view of the effects of the Blitz: ‘flattened buildings, debris still smouldering – it really was the most horrific sight. It made me realise I needed to be part of the war, to take the war back to the enemy. I joined up because everyone else was; I wanted to get in before it was over. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life having missed out when all my friends were part of it.’ He also had another motivation: a close friend of his had joined the Navy and had drowned when his ship was sunk in the Mediterranean. ‘I thought to myself, I will have to meet his family some time, see them and talk to them, and if I haven’t “done my bit”, I will be very embarrassed.’6

  Grimes couldn’t swim, which ruled out the Royal Navy, and he didn’t want ‘anything to do with the Army in case there was trench warfare’, so that left the RAF. ‘With one eye on the end of the war and what I might do,’ he decided to learn a new skill and get a trade by becoming a wireless operator. After training, he joined 106 Squadron, and such was the carnage among Bomber Command’s Main Force aircrew that Sydney’s crew became only the second from his squadron ever to survive their thirty-op tour of duty. ‘You’d come back from a meal or briefing,’ Sydney says, shaking his head at the memory:

  and the Committee of Adjustment [the men tasked with clearing out the lockers and personal effects of men killed or missing in action] would be clearing away belongings. One day we woke up and they were clearing the personal items away: photos, clothes, everything, just going in a big sack. Another crew gone. It was quite a stark image. But you couldn’t let yourself think about that – it would never happen to you! Of course we all said that, didn’t we? And it happened to half of Bomber Command.

  To dwell on the losses was to invite uncomfortable reflections on their own slim chances of survival, and thoughts of the dead were usually set aside as swiftly as their possessions were whisked away by the Committee of Adjustment. That was always done within hours, partly on the principle of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, but also because, in the brutal pragmatism of combat squadrons, the bed and locker space would be needed at once for the dead man’s replacement.

  Mac Hamilton illustrated the necessarily harsh realities of life on a squadron where some men would not return from almost every op. After one night raid, Hamilton fell into bed about six in the morning and had just got to sleep when he heard:

  this clump, clump, clump, and thought, What the hell are they making all that noise for? I got up and there were these two corporals with red bands round their hats. I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ and they said, ‘We are the Committee of Adjustment, sir. These men are missing, presumed dead … we’ve got to collect their equipment.’ They had this blanket spread on the floor and our stuff all mixed together. So I said, ‘That’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine. You can have the rest.’ And I went back to sleep.7

  While working at E. K. Cole, Sydney Grimes had met Iris, a girl who was a temporary copy typist there, filling the time until her seventeenth birthday, when she could begin training as a nurse, like her father and mother. Sydney was only eighteen months older than her but, Iris says with a smile, ‘he looked very grown up, so I always called him “Mr Grimes”.’8

  Grimes says he knew at once that she was ‘the one’, but at first he didn’t want her to get too involved, ‘in case I didn’t make it through, but she wanted to get married in case anything did happen to me! I realised I didn’t want to lose her and needed to commit.’

  Iris was now working as a nurse at a hospital in Leytonstone and Grimes visited her whenever he was on leave.

  We lived life to the full and in the moment – we never said it, but I suppose at the back of our minds was the thought we might not get those moments again. We didn’t talk about what I did, I didn’t want to bother her with all that. She was seeing the injured brought in all the time, so I felt she was taking more chances than me, to be honest, living near the docks which were being bombed all the time. She had enough worries of her own. I didn’t have a lucky charm, but I flew with a picture of Iris tucked safely in my wallet. It meant she was with me every time I got airborne. I never did tell her about that; in fact I’m not even sure she knows today!

  It was true – amazingly – seventy years after their war together, his beloved wife still did not know her picture had kept him company on every operation over enemy territory.

  It is not difficult to understand their reluctance to talk about the dangers they faced. Iris recalls:

  I tried to be brave when I was with him, and not show him I was worried, but it was really horrible when he had to go back to the squadron. I would lie awake at night, wondering where he was and what he was doing. I knew he was in danger and I thought about him being killed, though I didn’t tell him of course. I’d hear the bombers going over and wonder if he was in them, wonder if he was safe, wonder if he’d get home.

  Iris herself was far from safe:

  We were being bombed in east London, which was very frightening at times – the Germans were doing it to us and our boys were taking it back to them. I had a friend who was killed in the bombing but I was seeing the reality of the war constantly with the casualties being brought into the wards. It made me think about what the Germans were suffering too. I’d had a German pen-pal before the war and we would write and tell each other about our lives and family. I used to love receiving her letters and news; we knew everything about each other’s lives. I worried about her, wondered what she was going through. Luckily she survived and we carried on again after the war was over!

  Sydney and Iris Grimes’s wedding

  As Sydney and Iris relived their wartime experiences from their retirement home near Cambridge, Sydney’s eyes lit up. ‘I’ve just remembered!’ he says:

  I did once talk about death with my crew. I’ve only just remembered this incident! Before we had even done one op on 106 Squadron, our navigator, Bruce Bayne, had to stand in for another nav who was sick. So his first op was to be with another crew. When we woke up that morning, he was lying in the next bed to me writing his last will and testament on the wall – I can still see him doing it now! I asked what on earth he was doing it for. He simply replied, ‘Well, you never know, do you?’ If I don’t get back, you’ve seen my will, you can tell my family what my last wishes are.’

  Airmen had to be lucky as well as good, and Iris’s husband readily acknowledges his own good fortune, especially after a low-level attack on Stettin in south-west Germany. ‘All the way home, we managed to find every flak ship out there. We were weaving all over the place, trying to find a clear track, and ended up over the Isle of Sylt, a German naval base, so we got even more shot up there!’ The ground crew counted over 100 holes in the aircraft when they got back and their Lancaster had to be written off. As flak battered the aircraft and punched holes in the fuselage, while the pilot threw the Lancaster around, it had sounded ‘like handfuls of gravel being thrown against a tin shack’ and Sydney could smell ‘burning chunks of flak shell’. ‘The wireless op wasn’t a busy man,’ he says. ‘Most of the time you were just listening to the radio, so you had a lot of time to contemplate what was happening around you. But you couldn’t show any fear, so you became a fatalist. You had to, or there was a danger you would end up LMF.’

  * * *

  LMF – lack of moral fibre – was the RAF’s catch-all euph
emism for a number of different circumstances, covering everything from becoming ‘flak happy’ (as combat fatigue was called) to refusing to fly on operations or failing to return to base after leave, and it could lead to disciplinary action. However, the basis for such charges was often extremely flimsy and there was a widespread – and possibly justified – feeling that charges of LMF were sometimes laid as much ‘pour encourager les autres’ as to punish genuine cowardice. It was often almost impossible to tell whether a pilot had turned back because of mechanical failure or navigational error, or because he’d simply bottled it, but, in contrast to traditional British notions of justice and fair play, the authorities sometimes seemed to operate on a basis of ‘guilty until proved innocent’.

  An op to Leipzig flown by Bob Knights’ crew almost ended up with LMF charges against them. They were flying through thick cloud on their way to the target when the airspeed indicator froze up, leaving Knights flying by ‘feel’. Suddenly he noticed that they were losing altitude at a rate of 2,000 feet per minute. The flight engineer told him that the number-two engine had stopped. ‘It can’t have done,’ Knights said, ‘because I’d have felt the swing,’ but that was explained when the flight engineer looked out of the other side, and saw that the number-three engine had stopped as well. ‘So there we were,’ Knights said, ‘on two engines, going down, in cloud, so I yelled at the bomb-aimer to jettison the bomb-load.’ They came out of the base of the cloud at 5,000 feet and eventually managed to restart the engines, but since they now had no bombs to drop, they turned and headed for home.

  ‘We lost a lot of aeroplanes on that Leipzig raid and there was hardly any opposition,’ Knights said. ‘I think they iced up but nothing official was said.’ However, when they reported what had happened at the debriefing, the Station Commander – a Group Captain, whereas Knights was a Flight Sergeant at the time – treated them with a scepticism that he might well not have shown to a fellow officer. ‘They were looking for people suffering from LMF,’ Knights said, ‘and I was getting quite belligerent at the third degree I was getting.’ Eventually, the Group Captain backed off and told them go to bed, and they heard no more about it.

  In the vast majority of cases, an inquiry today would be much more likely to conclude that the pilot was suffering from PTSD rather than LMF. Australian pilot Bruce Buckham bravely spoke up at an inquiry on behalf of another pilot who was being accused of lack of moral fibre. Buckham freely admitted his own fears, saying that he was ‘dreadfully afraid’ every time he flew an op, but ‘one of the things you had to do was not to show anybody else how you felt. Being shot up by ground defences or fighters, or coned by searchlights, this plays on a man’s mind all the time, and after a certain number of trips it would only be human for a bod to think “There’s no future in this,” and you’d get the extreme cases where they’d either go missing or cave in.’

  At the other pilot’s LMF inquiry, Buckham told the panel of senior officers, ‘This man has … forced himself to go right into the heart of Germany, he’s dropped his bombs and brought his crew back twenty-one times. Now he’s reached his limit, he can’t go again and if I had my way, I’d give him the VC because he’s gone twenty-one times before this awful thing has happened to him. I don’t think you should court-martial him.’ His advice was heeded and Buckham later said, ‘I’ve got as much respect for that bloke today as I have for a VC.’9

  However, not every crew was as motivated and conscientious as those on 617 Squadron. There were tales of aircrew sent to a heavily defended target skirting the edge of the defences and dropping their bombs wide. ‘An awful lot of bombs fell outside the target area because people just didn’t press on,’ Johnny Johnson says. ‘And there were also instances where people aborted because they just didn’t like the look of the target. Icing could sometimes be a problem, but there were times when it was just used as an excuse to come back. It did happen, though it certainly never happened with us.’10

  The consequences of being deemed lacking moral fibre were draconian. One airman recalls the ‘sad, sad sight’ of a comrade being humiliated for having had enough. In his diary in June 1944, he recorded:

  The entire strength of the station was on parade. By order. No exceptions. This sergeant had refused to fly an op. He had been accused and found guilty of LMF. There he was standing out in front, all on his own, in full view of every person in the unit, to be stripped of his wings and then his sergeant’s tapes. They had all been unstitched beforehand so they came away easily when they were ripped from his uniform. He was immediately posted elsewhere.11

  Les Munro was brutally realistic in his view of the risks the crews faced:

  There was certainly no discussion about what we’d do when the war was over – we never spoke of the future. There wasn’t much point if there was a possibility you might not survive. I was a fatalist – whatever was going to happen would simply occur come what may. If I was killed, so be it. I never thought, Come tomorrow I might not be alive – it didn’t worry me. If you started to worry if you’d cop it on any raid – that was the beginning of the end of it all. You’d end up being taken off ops, and no one wanted that.

  * * *

  Sydney Grimes had completed his first tour in September 1943 and became an instructor at Balderton, where one of his first pupils was Leonard Cheshire, who arrived in November 1943 to do a crash course on Lancasters before taking over command of 617 Squadron. ‘He was the finest man I ever met in my life,’ Grimes says.

  He was a group captain and he would sit with each of us on the aircraft, asking us about our role and some of our experiences. He sat down on the step beneath my feet and chatted away, genuinely interested in my job and what I had to do as part of the crew. He wanted to know about me, and my views on the job, the Lancaster, 5 Group – everything. I’d never had a pilot, let alone a senior officer, do that before. As he finished, he asked me if I wanted to go back on ops. I said, ‘Yes sir, if the war is still going on when I finish here.’

  Within a few months he had joined Cheshire’s new squadron. Bored with giving the same lecture three or four times a day, and wanting to go back to the front line, he joined another instructor, Bernard ‘Barney’ Gumbley, a pilot who was looking for a crew to go back on ops with him and had been offered the Pathfinders or 617 Squadron.

  Gumbley was a New Zealander from Napier in Hawkes Bay. His parents were originally struggling small shopkeepers, and so poor that Barney and his brother slept in a tent behind the shop, except in the coldest weather when they would take refuge in the attic. However, in the early 1930s they set up a mobile motion-picture business, touring small towns and villages in rural areas of the South Island with a film projector mounted on the back of a Ford Model-T truck. They persuaded the townsfolk and villagers to cut a hole in the rear wall of their community halls and then reversed the truck up to the wall, pushed the lens of the projector through the hole and projected their movies onto a portable screen inside. Gumbley’s brother painted posters of the movies on show, Gumbley himself manned the projector and his sister sold the tickets. The nitrate film stock used then was highly inflammable, and on one occasion the projector caught fire during a screening, forcing Gumbley to jump into the driving seat and drive the burning truck away from the building to stop the hall being burnt down. He was called up by the RNZAF in February 1941, and, after arriving in England, served a tour with 49 Squadron. Having completed his final trip of that tour, the fun-loving Gumbley and his crew ‘celebrated at the local pub, winding up at a dance on the camp, and they say that I really came out of my shell and nearly disgraced the fair name of New Zealand!’12

  Barney Gumbley’s crew

  Awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal, he took his Aunt Sophie and Uncle Ernest to the investiture at Buckingham Palace, and described what happened in a letter to his loved ones. ‘We joined the queue fairly early at the gates,’ he said:

  and I don’t know who was the most itchy. It was agony. Anyway, after a long wait we move thro
ugh the courtyard where I left the others to wait in the hall while we paraded inside to be checked present and double-checked in case we decided to creep out. There must have been 1,000 of us altogether. First there were the Navy types, mostly with ribbons on their chests overflowing onto the other side of their tunics. Then the Army. Not so many of these. We came up next, about 100 of us, streams of civilians and Home Guard … An hour and a half later, the queue began to move past ‘his nibs’. Ages went by, then it was the Air Force’s turn.

  When his name was read out, Gumbley was:

  in such a flat spin as I’m blowed if I heard it, but I stepped up and bowed (can you imagine it?) … Having chatted for a few seconds, I stepped back, bowed again, marched off with medal swaying and before I had a chance to look at it, another type grabbed it and put it in a box. Pretty smart work I thought. The ceremony did impress me though, and the next time I know what to expect! King George stood the strain pretty well seeing that he does the same thing to literally thousands week in week out I suppose. And I have a whole lot of respect for him considering the impediment in his speech, which does make him a trifle self-conscious.

  Grimes was still only twenty-two when they crewed up together, whereas Gumbley, a quietly spoken, shy man ‘but very well liked’, was much older than all his crew – twenty-nine and, says Grimes, ‘an old man by the standards back then, but he was the complete pilot. He loved to fly above a perfectly flat cloud, put the wing down perpendicular, and carve a figure of eight in the cloud!’