After the Flood

by John Nichol

  Grimes had no hesitation in joining up with him, but he ‘wasn’t keen on going back to Main Force with all of the losses and mass raids’, so 617 Squadron seemed like a good idea. ‘I felt we were joining an elite squadron and it was an honour to go there.’ The procedure was so informal that he arrived on the squadron without any paperwork being completed: ‘I just turned up and started flying! I actually did two ops to the Tirpitz before I’d become an official member of the squadron.’

  Grimes had an extra motivation as he prepared for the first of those ops, 617 Squadron’s second raid on the Tirpitz on 29 October 1944. ‘My brother was in the Navy on HMS London, escorting Arctic convoys,’ he says. ‘He’d told me about the Tirpitz and I knew it worried him, so I thought if I could do something to help him out, all the better.’

  It proved to be a real baptism of fire. ‘The flak was very heavy on that trip,’ flight engineer Frank Tilley says:

  You could see it coming up, coloured shells – yellow, red, black and grey – rising slowly towards you, so close you felt you could almost reach out and touch them. Then they exploded and blossomed out in a cloud of smoke and shrapnel. As you fly towards it, it’s like flying into a tunnel of darkness. If it hits you, you get peppered with showers of shrapnel. Of course, if one hits you, there’s nothing you can do. You realise it could be the end, but you just have to sit it out. You just have to hope that it hasn’t got your name on it.13

  Unfortunately some of the flak turned out to have Bill Carey’s name on it. From Mount Gambier in South Australia, Carey – ‘a very charming chap’, according to Basil Fish – had been born in the dying days of the First World War. He enlisted with the RAAF in August 1941 and left for England twelve months later for advanced training.14

  After making the conversion to Lancaster bombers, Carey was posted to 106 Squadron in February 1944. He flew ops over Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Berlin, as well as the regular Main Force attacks on ‘Happy Valley’ – the Ruhr. After completing his first tour, he joined 617 on 10 April 1944, making his ‘second dickey’ flight (the training flight as an observer required of all pilots before they could take the controls themselves) the same night on a raid on St-Cyr in occupied France. His first flight with his own crew was the attack on the marshalling yards at Juvisy a week later.15 Short and stocky, with a habit of weighing the most casual of remarks as if it might contain a deadly insult, he was known on 617 as ‘The Australian James Cagney’, which may well have been a reference to his lack of inches rather than his acting ability.16

  As Carey made his first, unsuccessful, run over the Tirpitz on that crisp October morning, flak bursts from the ship’s guns riddled his aircraft, destroying his starboard outer engine and causing a fuel leak, but although fuel was ‘spraying from it, the damaged engine did not catch fire’.17 Alex McKie, navigator in Carey’s ‘Easy Elsie’, had guided the Lancaster on to its bomb-run and was watching the Tirpitz 18,000 feet below when suddenly ‘the aircraft heaved amidst a massive explosion’ and he muttered to himself, ‘Christ, that was close.’

  They were thrown off course and he heard the Canadian bomb-aimer, Don McLennan, call, ‘Dummy run, we have to go round again.’

  ‘For God’s sake Don,’ McKie shouted, ‘let’s drop the bloody bomb and get the hell out of here!’

  Carey’s voice broke in, cool as a cucumber: ‘Steady Mac, we haven’t come all this way to waste a bomb. That son-of-a-bitch battleship is going to pay for hitting us on the first run!’

  They actually had to make another six runs before, with flak bursting all around them, they got the bomb away. ‘It was hell on earth for us,’ McKie said, ‘but we did it anyway.’

  As Carey attempted to make a low-level getaway, he was hit by a further burst of flak, fired by a lone gunner in a village on the small island they were overflying; it silenced his port inner engine and holed his fuel tanks.18 Gerry Witherick, the rear gunner, saw fuel ‘streaming past my turret like nobody’s business’.19 By a miracle none of the leaking fuel ignited, but the flak had also damaged the hydraulics, so that the landing gear and flaps lowered and the bomb doors swung open, causing a heavy drag on the aircraft. With only two surviving engines – both running at maximum revs to counter the drag from the flaps, bomb doors and landing gear – and severely depleted fuel, Carey felt they had no chance of recrossing the North Sea, and, in rough seas, ditching in the hope of being picked up by a destroyer was not an attractive proposition. Instead, he opted to try to make for neutral Sweden and crash-land there. Sydney Grimes had heard Carey radio that he’d ‘lost one engine and another was dodgy. He was telling Tait he wouldn’t be able to get back. Tait just wished him luck and gave him permission to leave.’ However, Frank Tilley ‘didn’t see Carey get hit, or even hear that it had happened. That’s just the way it was – you didn’t really hear what was happening to others.’

  ‘Unfortunately, we had now lost an engine, hydraulics and quite a bit of fuel through the various holes in the aircraft,’ McKie said. ‘We were not going to get home, that was for sure, so our options were limited. Crash-land in Norway and be taken prisoner – not my idea of fun. Ditch in the freezing sea and almost certainly die – again, not a brilliant choice. Or limp inland as the fuel bled away in the hope of finding a field to put her down in. I grabbed my maps and started working.’

  Carey told his crew, ‘We can’t ditch and we can’t get home, so it’s over the mountains to Sweden.’

  Gerry Witherick was aghast. ‘It will ruin my reputation. I always get home. This can’t happen to me.’

  ‘Can’t it?’ Carey said. ‘You watch!’20

  He set his aircraft to climb, but the wounded Lancaster was agonisingly slow to respond and he ordered the crew to reduce weight by dumping every movable item, including their radios, parachutes and bombsight, though in case of attack by German fighters he told Witherick in the rear turret to retain his guns until they had crossed the Swedish border. They destroyed the top-secret equipment, such as the Gee navigation set and the SABS, with a few blows from the fire-axe before dumping them out of the hatch, and threw their maps and other classified material out of the bomb-bay.

  Carey nursed ‘Easy Elsie’ on for more than 200 miles, inching upwards to gain the height needed to clear the forbidding Norwegian mountain ranges barring the way. He breathed a sigh of relief as the altimeter reached 6,000 feet – the minimum height necessary to ensure a safe transit. They crossed into Sweden through a high mountain pass with 100 feet to spare, and, after his crew had used emergency air-bottles to lock down the undercarriage, they crash-landed in a marshy field near the Lappland village of Porjus, deep inside the Arctic Circle.

  By a miracle, everyone survived the impact, the only serious injury being Carey’s knee, ‘cut to the bone’ and badly dislocated as they crashed. The crew gingerly extracted their skipper from the wrecked Lancaster and Witherick bound Carey’s knee while the others covered him with parachutes and lit a fire. They also set fire to their aircraft, destroying the rest of their maps and equipment.

  ‘We found out he was missing after we got back to Lossiemouth,’ Sydney Grimes says.

  I don’t think we really thought all that much about it. We accepted we were in a dicey business and so people would get killed or go missing. You were just thankful it wasn’t you – it was another bullet we’d dodged – wrong place, wrong time. After he was shot down, the Committee of Adjustment just came to clear his kit away and that was that, he’d gone. Of course, at that point we had no idea what had happened to him, if he was alive or dead, but someone soon came in to take his bed space. Such is life!

  Carey and his crew were still very much alive, and had been picked up by the local Home Guard. After a brief internment by the Swedes, they were sent back to the UK. Preserved in the deep freeze of the Arctic tundra, the wreckage of ‘Easy Elsie’ still lies where it fell, mute testimony to the skill, dedication and courage of Carey and his crew.

  * * *

  The remaining Lancasters
had continued the attack, and though the first two Tallboys missed the target, Jack Sayers, who dropped the third, saw the vivid flash of a bomb burst. Although the cloud cover made the sightings problematic, several other pilots also claimed hits or near-misses. Bob Knights, flying the last of his seventy combat ops, was circling around while his bomb-aimer and navigator plotted the fall of all the bombs. He said the Tirpitz ‘rocked’ under the impact of one blast, and he saw gouts of black smoke coming from the starboard bow and brown smoke from amidships.21 Several crews made repeated passes over the target in the hope that a break in the cloud would allow their bomb-aimer a glimpse of the ship, and most eventually dropped their bombs, though three took their Tallboys home with them rather than drop them blind.

  Mac Hamilton had a ‘hang-up’, meaning his bomb would not release. He went round again and again, with Willie Tait flying alongside to draw off some of the anti-aircraft fire. Hamilton finally managed to release his Tallboy on the fourth circuit, by which time they’d found enough of a break in the cloud to sight the target and convinced themselves that they had scored a hit on the Tirpitz. Hamilton was the last to leave the target but the returning crews still had other dangers to face.22

  Bruce Buckham in the Lancaster camera plane had to crash-land at Waddington. Halfway across the North Sea he heard ‘a terrific crash, and in the morning light we could see the starboard leg was hanging down, engine nacelles flapping in the breeze and a gaping hole in the wing. A shell had passed through the undercarriage and between Number One and Number Two fuel tanks.’ They landed at Waddington on one wheel after a marathon flight lasting fourteen hours and twenty minutes.23

  Joppy Joplin’s crew also had a heart-in-mouth return flight, with an over-revving port engine eating into their fuel. ‘With this engine problem, we had a long and dangerous journey back to safety,’ Frank Tilley says, ‘a continuous trek at six hundred feet over never-ending water, nothing to see, nothing to look at, just water. It really was causing me some serious concern, because if we went down in that, our chances were almost zero. I really was worried about the fuel state and wanted to get it on the ground.’ They managed to reach the Shetlands and landed safely on a Coastal Command airfield, despite its having only ‘a very short runway with a small mountain at the end of it’.

  Arthur Kell, with his ‘stowaway’ Aspro Astbury aboard, had spent so long circling over the Tirpitz, waiting in vain for enough visibility to bomb the ship, that he was desperately short of fuel and had to make for Sumburgh in the Shetlands rather than Lossiemouth. The Station Commander there ordered them to go back out to sea and jettison their bomb-load before landing. Landing with a Tallboy aboard was now routine for 617’s pilots and Kell had no intention of wasting his precious and highly expensive cargo, so he flew out to sea, opened and closed the bomb doors as if he had jettisoned the bomb, then returned and landed. The huge weight of the bomb put such a strain on the Lancaster that there was a danger of permanent damage to the main spar if it was left in place too long, so, having taxied to the grassed dispersal area, Kell reopened the bomb doors and after checking that all the bomb switches were set to ‘SAFE’, Aspro released the Tallboy onto the grass under the aircraft.

  Unfortunately the Station Commander, who had never seen a Lancaster before, had just come over for a closer look, and was now standing, ashen-faced, staring at the bomb. Aspro strolled over to him and patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’s quite all right, sir, never you fear,’ he said. ‘I dropped it “safe” and it’s not going to go off. We’d have heard the bang by now if it was.’ He banged the nose of the Tallboy for emphasis as he spoke. The Station Commander gave a weak smile, tottered back to his car and drove off without another word.24

  Benny Goodman’s crew had returned safely to Lossiemouth, and Benny was looking forward to a well-earned rest before his much-anticipated rendezvous with the ‘very pretty young WAAF’ he had bumped into the night before and who had promised to meet him after the op. He and his bomb-aimer, Tony Hayward, had seized the chance for a few hours’ sleep, but he had told Hayward, ‘Whatever happens when we get back from this op, no matter how tired I am, when we’ve had a bit of shut-eye you have to wake me up so I can meet this girl.’ In the event Hayward woke up and sneaked out of their room, leaving his exhausted skipper sleeping soundly. He went off to meet the WAAF himself, who apparently was ‘most welcoming’. ‘I was absolutely bloody furious with him!’ Goodman says, laughing despite himself.

  * * *

  Surveillance flights after the attack once more showed the Tirpitz still upright in the water, but the great battleship had actually suffered more severe damage. A near-miss from a Tallboy, exploding within 20 yards of the ship, had bent the port propeller shaft and buckled the plating around it, causing fresh torrents of seawater to pour into the damaged sections of the ship. Whether the Tirpitz still posed a genuine threat to the Arctic convoys was dubious in the extreme, for it had sustained so much damage in this and the earlier raid that it was now incapable of venturing onto the open seas at all, and German commanders saw it solely as a floating gun battery. However, it remained afloat, and, not for the first time, Churchill’s personal obsessions were driving his country’s military strategy, as he made increasingly strident calls for it to be sunk. ‘No other target is comparable to it,’ he had previously claimed, and he now made his wishes even more explicit: ‘Every effort should be made to attack this ship, even if losses are incurred.’

  Another joint attack by 617 and 9 Squadrons was duly authorised, but little time remained to carry it out. At Tromsø’s latitude, inside the Arctic Circle, there was already only a handful of hours of daylight, and after 26 November the sun would not rise above the horizon until the following spring. Bad weather over the target caused repeated postponements of the raid as the 617 crews found themselves shuttling between Woodhall Spa and Lossiemouth, but on 12 November 1944, Operation Catechism, the third and final assault on the Tirpitz, was at last launched. The crews had once more assembled at Woodhall Spa on 11 November for their final briefings. Among them was Aspro Astbury, again determined not to miss the action. This time he had gone AWOL from a holding unit in Bournemouth, from where he was about to be repatriated to Australia, but he was unable to resist the lure of a final flight with 617 and the chance to be in at what he hoped would be the death of the Tirpitz.

  John Leavitt’s novice crew were also among those assembling for the briefing, and their first ever op was to be the attack on the Tirpitz. The wireless operator, Colin Cole, recalled:

  We were very unusual in that we hadn’t done any ops before being posted to 617 Squadron. I think we were all a little bit startled by this. I knew about the Dams raid from the news, but not that I was joining the squadron who carried it out. I can’t even remember how we found out. It was never discussed on the squadron – I suppose it was old news. You didn’t dwell on past glories, or even on the past; it was what was ahead that mattered.25

  Four years earlier, Cole had been a sixteen-year-old boy in his home town of Guildford, watching ‘the Battle of Britain going on over my head. All my friends used to watch them wheel and dive above our heads, cheering them on.’ One of his comrades on 617, Murray Vagnolini, the wireless operator with Nelson Hill’s crew, had actually been evacuated from the blitzed East End to a ‘safer area’ that turned out to be not far from Biggin Hill. ‘So we’d actually been evacuated to the centre of the Battle of Britain! Oh, it was fantastic watching the Battle of Britain there! We had a Spitfire crash-land in the field just by my uncle’s house.’26

  Inspired by his own grandstand view of the Battle of Britain, Colin Cole joined the RAF as soon as he was old enough, but did his training in the sleepy setting of Yatesbury in Wiltshire. ‘We’d seen the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. I can’t imagine anyone had even seen a bomb at Yatesbury!’ he says now, with a chuckle. After joining 617, there were months of training, familiarisation and bombing practice on the Wainfleet ranges, and they were not officially informed whe
n they became operational. ‘Our names just appeared on the Battle Order which was posted in the Mess. We were pleased to see that at last we had progressed onto ops, although looking back, it was an unusual op to have as your first trip.’27

  Most of the other crews already knew the details backwards and had the flight plan firmly imprinted on their minds, but there had been one worrying development since the last attack. When briefing the pilots, Willie Tait had told them, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, chaps, but since the last trip, the Germans have moved two squadrons of fighters to be near the Tirpitz at Bardufoss.’

  That news sent a chill through every man present. Bardufoss was only ten minutes’ flying time from Tromsø, and the thought of the German fighters swarming around their now almost defenceless Lancasters, with only rear guns to protect them, ‘made us swallow a bit’, Frank Tilley said, with a shudder at the memory. They would have swallowed even harder, had they known the calibre of pilot flying those fighters: the top three pilots had over 500 kills between them.28 The loss of the mid-upper turret and gunner gave the Lancasters a little more airspeed, but they were also aware that ‘we’d lost a pair of eyes … scanning all the time. So we looked on that with some misgivings.’29 ‘We were a little bit apprehensive,’ another crewman recalled, ‘but, like good little boys, we all went off.’30

  Not all the aircrew knew about the fighters. At least one pilot didn’t mention the fact to his crew, who remained in blissful ignorance as they prepared for the op.31 They took off from Woodhall Spa and some crews flew to Lossiemouth to refuel, while the remainder went to Milltown. That evening, with a few hours in hand before take-off in the very early hours of the following day, some of the aircrew, still wearing their flying gear, went to a dance in Lossiemouth village.