by John Nichol
Twenty-two-year-old Yorkshireman Ken Gill was a veteran of forty-six operations and had already been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross after his first tour, though he had not yet had a chance to attend a presentation ceremony. He clearly adored his young wife, starting his letters ‘Darling Heart’ and signing off with so many kisses they run off the end of the page. In one he responds to her concerns about the daily dangers he faced, writing, ‘Yes Sweetheart, we do “daylight ops” but I’ve changed my mind about them now; you don’t feel half so scared when you see what’s going on.’ He also wrote of his huge affection for his infant son. ‘So Derek is a tinker? Oh well, I suppose all lads are but he’ll calm down. Keep well and smiling, your loving hubby, Ken. xxx’
As Vera had suspected, her husband was airborne that bright spring day. And it was a daylight operation. While the Main Force targeted Bremen, 617 Squadron, including Grimes’s old crew piloted by Barney Gumbley, were on a raid against the Arbergen railway bridge a few miles to the south of the city. As Gumbley and his flight engineer, Eddie Barnett, ‘a tall, fair-haired, good-looking Londoner’, were putting on their flying kit in the locker room, the rear gunner of another crew, Bob Barry, asked Gumbley, who by this time ‘had amassed a vast total of missions’: ‘When are you going to give it [up] Barney?’29
‘Oh, pretty soon,’ Gumbley said. ‘I’ve just about had enough.’
Although he’d been stood down from ops when the wireless operators and mid-upper gunners were dispensed with to save weight, Sydney Grimes was still ‘seeing my crew and chatting to them. I used to go up to the Flights with them in the morning, just seeing what was going on, still trying to be part of it really.’ He and Gumbley had already made plans for what they would do when the war was over. Grimes recalls:
Barney’s father had a chain of mobile cinemas which went around to all the little towns in New Zealand showing movies. He wanted to extend the business when Barney came home and asked if some of the crew might like to move out there and be part of the bigger business. I was very tempted. It seemed like a great opportunity. It was unusual to talk about the future, but we had a sense the war might soon be over so it started to come up in conversation. But I didn’t give too much thought to it because I didn’t want to tempt fate. I was married, Iris was taking her final exams, we all needed to think about what we were going to do – but it was all in the future. I didn’t dwell on it. That would have been bad luck whilst we were still fighting the Germans.
The night before the Arbergen op, Grimes had been in the Mess with his crew as usual. ‘It was just a normal evening,’ he says. ‘They’d been told they were on ops next day so had an early call at five a.m., but I never thought about getting up to see them off. I rather thought that might be bad luck, so just told them I’d see them the next day.’
The raid was successful. A German civilian who witnessed the attack described one of the falling bombs as ‘like the outlines of a diving whale’. Relieved of its massive burden, he watched the aircraft as it ‘shot up perhaps a hundred and fifty to two hundred metres, like a fast elevator on its way to the top. Then there was a gong-like sound, very strange, metallic,’ as the bomb detonated.30 Two arches of the bridge were destroyed by the effects of numerous near-misses from Tallboys and Grand Slams.
The human impact of such raids on civilians was vividly demonstrated when an elderly lady’s house near the bridge was razed to the ground by the bombs. There was a small bomb-shelter behind the house, and the lady’s son hurried there but found it completely buried by rubble. He began tearing at the debris with his bare hands and discovered the body of his mother. Neighbours ‘took him aside in order to save him from the terrible sight’. Several of her neighbours also died in the shelter. The pressure wave from the blast had blown the woman’s cast-iron sewing machine into an apple tree 50 yards from the house. It was the only one of his mother’s possessions that he was able to retrieve.31
However, there were heavy casualties among the attackers as well. The Lancaster crews had to fly through a dense flak barrage and could also see the new German Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters – the world’s first operational jets – ‘easily dodge the Spitfires, Mustangs and Lightnings which chased them all over the sky while the jets picked off Lancasters at will’.
As they began their bomb-run, rear gunner Bob Barry saw the neighbouring Lancaster, piloted by Barney Gumbley, hit in the starboard wing, either by fire from a fighter or by flak. More than sixty years later, that moment was still seared into his memory:
It started a death dive and then spiralled a few thousand feet before it exploded. There was no chance for anyone to bale out. I still have a crystal-clear picture in my mind of Eddie Barnett’s white face staring helplessly out of the cockpit’s starboard window. He appeared to be looking directly at me, but I suppose he was staring in horror at the space where the wing used to be. Like so many others, Barney just didn’t make up his mind soon enough; nor did the crew.32
The burning Lancaster crashed in a field near the village of Okel, 7 miles from the Arbergen bridge, and its bomb-load detonated moments later. The violent explosion ‘shook the entire countryside’, reduced the aircraft to ‘minute fragments’ and left a crater 60 feet deep and 100 feet across.33 All five crew died instantly.
Sixty years later Gumbley’s nephew John visited the crash site and was directed to a nearby house. Frau Else Lippmann answered the door and, astonishingly, even though all those years had passed, ‘knew immediately what we were enquiring about when a plane crash was mentioned’. Ten years old at the time, she and a friend described seeing the bomber flying ‘unusually low’ compared with the aircraft they normally saw passing high overhead. They then saw a lone German fighter plane follow it and fire a short burst into it. Smoke trailed from the bomber and they were scared that it would hit the village, but then it suddenly went down in a field, ‘exploding and shaking the whole village. [Else] ran out onto the field to look and was followed by her mother, scolding her for being so naughty. Then a policeman came and told the children not to go out onto the field as it was too dangerous.’34
Waiting for his friends back at Woodhall Spa, Sydney Grimes watched the other Lancasters return from the raid, and his anxiety turned to dread as the minutes, lengthening into hours, dragged by with no sign of them. The agonising suspense finally ended when one of the returning crewmen broke the news to him. His crew had perished. ‘These were my friends who I’d fought alongside,’ Grimes says, ‘and been through so much with. If I’d had my way, I’d have been on that aircraft too.’
‘It was such a shock when his crew were killed,’ his wife Iris remembers. ‘I think he kept it from me for a while so as not to bother me, but you just hoped they might have survived somehow and be prisoners … but of course they hadn’t. It wasn’t to be, and that was so sad.’
There was even worse to come. The crew’s flight engineer, Eddie Barnett, was ‘a fellow “Townie” – a Southend-on-Sea man’, Grimes says. ‘His mother received the telegram “missing, presumed killed” and she knew my own mother lived close by, so she got on the bus to our village and knocked at my mother’s door, saying what terrible news it all was that we were all dead. My mother didn’t know that I was no longer on ops, so they were crying in each other’s arms, talking about the loss of their sons.’35
In the chaos and confusion, Grimes’s mother did not call his wife, Iris, to check because ‘she didn’t want to intrude’ on her grief. ‘She didn’t want to trouble me,’ Iris says, ‘so she went to see my mother and told her what she’d heard. It was a terrible time for parents. I think it was worse for the mothers. We were young, eager, perhaps naive, but they knew the realities and always feared the worst.’ When Grimes’s brother came home on leave from the Navy that weekend, he wondered why neither Iris nor the squadron had contacted his mother, and rang the Mess at Petwood to ask for details of his brother’s death. ‘Oh no, he’s still here,’ someone said and called Sydney to the phone.
There were no funerals for his missing crewmates – there were no bodies to bury, they had just gone. ‘It was a big loss, though it wasn’t an unusual thing to lose your friends,’ Grimes says.
The old sweats used to advise us not to make close friends at all, then you couldn’t be shocked by the loss. To survive, you all needed the basic skills and you really needed to get on well and work well together, but you also needed a good bit of luck. I guess the day Barney was shot down, the luck ran out, but a few feet difference in the sky, a slightly different speed, and they might have survived. It was just six weeks before the end of the war.
That I could and should have been on that flight with them was a terrible thought at the time, but I do think someone ‘up there’ must have been looking after me, telling me I had a future.
The loss of his entire crew increased the stress on Grimes and, he says, ‘though my nerves never went, after Barney and the rest were killed, Iris said she could see a twitch developing in my cheek. You could see if someone was on the edge – they developed the “twitch”. But mine didn’t get too bad, I suppose because the war was nigh on over and I’d not be going back on ops.’
* * *
At her home in Leeds, if Vera Gill was distracted by a knock at the door as she was writing to her husband Ken, Gumbley’s navigator, one can only imagine the shock and instant understanding she must have experienced at seeing the telegram boy holding out a flimsy sheet of paper. The telegram was just one of many tens of thousands delivered to the relatives of the men of Bomber Command during the course of the war. It would begin, ‘regret to inform you …’
The letter she was writing to her husband was never finished.
CHAPTER 15
The Final Days
Despite the human cost, the first Grand Slam operations had been a startling success, and they marked the start of a new phase for the squadron, which went on to attack several more major railway viaducts across Germany, including Bremen and Nienburg, but it was another kind of industrial target that gave the most vivid demonstration of the Grand Slam’s war-winning potential.
Military Intelligence had reported that 10,000 slave labourers were building a vast underground U-boat factory, code-named ‘Valentin’, near the Bremen suburb of Farge, on the river Weser, 40 kilometres upstream from Bremerhaven. Many of the labourers – German criminals and political prisoners, and French, Polish and Russian prisoners of war – were housed in a nearby concentration camp, and construction continued round the clock. Estimates of the death rate among the slave labourers range as high as 50 per cent. Life expectancy among the ‘iron detachments’ – Eisenkommandos – responsible for erecting the iron and steel girders was so low that one French survivor, Raymond Portefaix, gave them a different name: ‘suicide squads’.1 The factory they were building was to be used to construct a fleet of Type XXI super-submarines that were far faster, quieter and more deadly than any of the existing U-boats that were still sinking millions of tons of shipping.
The gateway in the factory’s western wall giving access to the river could be closed by a sliding bomb-proof door, and the factory itself was shielded by a concrete roof that was 14 feet thick at its western end and 23 feet thick on the eastern side – the biggest concrete structure in the world. A section of the factory could even be flooded to fully submerge each huge submarine for testing. Defended by dense anti-aircraft batteries, it was designed to withstand anything the Allies could throw at it, while beneath that protective shield, the factory’s slave labourers could produce a minimum of three super-submarines a week.
Harry Callan was one of thirty-two Irish-born British Merchant seamen incarcerated in the Farge camp and used as slave labourers in the building of Valentin. His daughter-in-law described his experience: ‘They were forced to work for over a year on the building on starvation rations. Body weight was more than halved in that time. Harry went from twelve stone to barely six stone in weight. Bunker Valentin was HELL. He is alive today due to the kindness and courage of some German families from the Farge and surrounding villages.’2
Allied commanders knew that the factory was under construction, but wanting the waste of Nazi resources to be as great as possible, they had held off from attacking it until it was almost finished. Only on 27 March 1945, when the factory was 90 per cent complete, with most of the machinery installed, and work beginning to pour the concrete for the roof that would have rendered it virtually invulnerable to air attack, was 617 Squadron ordered into action.
When the target was revealed at the briefing, the members of the most experienced and ‘probably the most “flak-happy”’ crews on the squadron were perturbed to discover that it was at Bremen, ‘a target to which we had been before in daylight and which had us fairly scared because our welcome had not been very pleasant on that occasion.’3
Their nerves caused the smokers among them to get through even more cigarettes than usual at the briefing, but as one of them stubbed out a cigarette, he failed to notice that a squadron humourist – possibly their CO, Johnny Fauquier himself, whose default stern expression hid a dry sense of humour – had connected the two ashtrays on their table with a line of cordite. The next moment there was ‘an explosion and an enormous puff of smoke! Seven flak-happy crewmen jumped to their feet and clutched each other like frightened children. Fauquier gave the ghost of a smile and said, very quietly, “Okay fellers, now let’s get on with the briefing!”’4
Johnny Fauquier with a Grand Slam
Twenty Lancasters of 617 Squadron, six carrying Tallboys and fourteen with Grand Slams fitted with time-delay fuses, were to target the U-boat pens, while ninety-five Lancasters from other squadrons in 5 Group made a simultaneous attack on the nearby oil storage depot. Two of 617’s pilots had to abort and turn back. One of them, Benny Goodman, had engine trouble from take-off and knew he was not likely to get to the target, but he had pressed ahead in the hope of sorting out the problem. He remembered:
The last thing I wanted to do was to have to ‘boomerang’, but we struggled to climb and just kept falling back, and could never have reached bombing height or got to the target with the rest of the squadron. It was always a very tough decision to turn back, but particularly so on 617 Squadron – it just wasn’t done. You had to have a damn good reason. Eventually I had to make the decision to return to base, but I still think about that decision today. Seventy years on, it still runs through my mind. Even though I know I made the right decision, it’s a blemish on my record I can’t erase.
As Benny sips coffee in the lounge of a Bracknell hotel near his home, anguish is etched on his face as he struggles – needlessly – to explain his decision:
If I’d pressed on, we would have been over the target at perhaps five thousand feet and on our own, so we could easily have been shot down and lost a crew … and then I would have been criticised for bad judgement! There was nothing I could do but I felt so dispirited and my morale really took a hit. It was all about the squadron’s reputation and personal pride and ethos – all self-inflicted of course, but the pressure was immense. You just don’t turn back!
The remaining crews reached the target and dropped eighteen bombs – eleven of them Grand Slams – from 18,000 feet. Sixteen fell among the buildings surrounding the complex, completely destroying them. The other two, both Grand Slams, hit the target dead centre at supersonic speed and bored down through the half-set concrete roof to bury themselves deep inside the structure. For some minutes nothing else happened, and guards and slave labourers were just emerging from their air-raid shelters when the time-delay fuses triggered the bombs. The blasts shook the complex like an earthquake, killing 300 men inside it and throwing those in the surrounding area off their feet. Harry Callan, working as a slave labourer, remembers seeing the bombs drop on the bunker with mixed feelings. He was excited that the Allies had arrived, but feared for the German families who had befriended the brutalised construction gangs. His lasting thoughts were for the many who had died building the ‘
monster’ and that their last work was being destroyed.5
When the smoke and dust cleared, save for the twin holes in the roof, the structure looked unaltered from the outside, but the interior was so badly damaged – a jumble of thousands of tons of shattered concrete and twisted steel – that the site had to be abandoned. The tottering Nazi regime’s prodigious investment of money, manpower and scarce resources – a last throw of the dice in an effort to win the war at sea – had come to nothing.
Soon after the end of the war, Murray Vagnolini went back to the site with Jock Calder. ‘I’ve a photo of me standing at one of these holes, an enormous crater,’ Vagnolini says. Down below the hole, they could see the wreckage of ‘about eight submarines’ that had been thrown around by the bomb blasts and smashed together like children’s toys.6
The remains of the massive structure have proved indestructible to this day. Just after the war it was used as a test-bed in ‘Project Ruby’ – a joint British and American evaluation of penetration bombs that saw well over a hundred bombs dropped on it without significant effect – and after being used for fifty years as a storage depot by the German Navy, it is now a museum and memorial: Denkort Bunker Valentin. Dark, dank and haunting, it is a stark memorial to some 4,000 souls who died during its construction.
