After the Flood

by John Nichol

  A fortnight later, on 9 April 1945, the squadron was tasked with an attack on the U-boat pens at Hamburg. Benny Goodman, still smarting over his aborted mission on the previous op, was one of seventeen crews who took part. This time he reached the target without problems, but once more his luck was out. ‘Our bomb hung up and simply didn’t come off,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t close the bomb-doors, so we had to turn for home with this damn thing still on board. Suddenly it came free.’ It fell not on the submarine pens or docks but in a nearby residential area, and its detonation caused carnage among the civilian inhabitants. ‘I felt really bad about hitting them,’ he says. ‘They were women and kids, and it really made me think about what we were doing, but there was nothing we could have done – the bomb just fell off.’

  Although all crews returned safely from the raid, Goodman’s had a very lucky escape when an Me 262 jet fighter ranged up alongside them. Much faster and better armed than any British fighter, it was a lethal adversary, with well over 500 claimed ‘kills’ against Allied aircraft by the end of the war. Goodman says:

  My flight engineer, who sat next to me in the jump seat – over Germany, two pairs of eyes were obviously much better than one! – nudged me and sort of nodded his head. I looked down at the instruments and I could see nothing wrong, so I went on flying. So he nudged me rather harder and moved his head more. I looked out of the starboard window and I was horrified to see the latest German fighter, an Me 262, in formation with us.

  The first thing that came into my head was the fact that we’d accidentally killed people in Hamburg and this was the payback. I really thought this was it. It didn’t look like any machine I’d seen before. I’d never seen the enemy close up like this, especially not in the latest jet fighter. It was all a little surreal. It was on our wing tip and there was simply nothing I could do. I stared over at him but that was it; there was no cheery wave between foes, there was no acknowledgement of each other. I told the crew there was an Me 262 on our wing and they just laughed in disbelief. Then the nav went into the astrodome and said, ‘Christ, it’s there!’ Suddenly it just banked away. All I could think was that he must have used all his ammunition shooting up other aircraft. Otherwise we would have been shot down. Another lucky escape!

  * * *

  The war in Europe was now entering its endgame. The Battle of Berlin began on 21 April 1945, the first meeting between US and Soviet forces took place on 25 April, and within two days Berlin was completely encircled by Allied troops. On 25 April, with Soviet artillery already pounding the heart of Berlin, Soviet troops fighting their way into the city and Adolf Hitler’s tottering regime about to fall, 617 Squadron launched their final op of the war: an attack on the Berghof – ‘The Eagle’s Nest’ – Adolf Hitler’s heavily fortified last redoubt, high in the Bavarian Alps.

  617 Squadron would the attack, dropping Grand Slams and Tallboys and marking the target for the 400 Main Force aircraft that would follow, obliterating not only Hitler’s eyrie but the SS barracks and weapon stores clustered around Berchtesgaden. There were reports from Military Intelligence that Hitler was making his last stand there, and the aircrews were not expecting a cakewalk, believing that it would be very heavily defended. Some crews were more nervous about the op than others, not least David Ware’s, flying with 635 Squadron. They had already flown forty-four ops, Berchtesgaden would be their forty-fifth, completing their tour of duty, and ‘we didn’t want to get shot down on our last trip’.7 Benny Goodman remembers that ‘there was no sense that this was a final op – it was just another target. We were still expecting a lot of flak defending the area!’

  The return flight would take seven hours fifteen minutes. They took off at dawn, flew right down the length of France, turned to the east at the Swiss border and flew on as if heading for Munich, before swinging onto a course for Berchtesgaden. Such was the Allies’ crushing air superiority by this stage of the war that there were almost no German fighters left to defend the target. ‘We were bristling with fighters,’ David Ware recalled, ‘total air superiority.’8 However, one Polish Mustang pilot with 317 Squadron described the anti-aircraft fire as ‘terrible’ and the sky ‘absolutely black’ with flak bursts. ‘I remember one Lancaster went over the target and missed it for some reason or another,’ he said. ‘And he turned round and went again a second time. We were trembling in view of the very heavy anti-aircraft fire, but there you are, British phlegm! And on the second round he dropped his bomb and joined the rest on his way back to England.’9

  Ware had been the first to drop a marker flare, ‘Not that you really needed them,’ he said, ‘you could see Berchtesgaden on the mountain very clearly. We had a great run in and marking was very accurate.’ Although Ware had a clear view, intermittent cloud, mist and snow cover on the ground were severe obstacles for 617’s crews, making it particularly difficult to identify Hitler’s personal complex, which in the event escaped serious damage. However, the SS barracks and fortifications were pulverised by 617’s Tallboys and the subsequent pounding by Main Force’s bombs.

  After the raid was over it was revealed that Hitler was still in his Berlin bunker and had not been at Berchtesgaden anyway, but the attack on his beloved mountain eyrie was of symbolic importance, and gave huge psychological satisfaction to the aircrews. After five and a half years, they were finally taking the war to Hitler’s own doorstep, though as Tony Iveson pointed out, ‘On the one hand, it was a satisfying two-finger gesture from RAF Bomber Command to the man who had started the war. On the other hand, two Lancasters were lost while making that gesture.’10

  * * *

  Just a few days later, on 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and on 8 May – VE Day – the Allies formally accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender. The war in Europe was over at last. But the men of Bomber Command had continued to fight and die until the final hours of the war. On the night of 2/3 May 1945, they attacked German ships assembling at Kiel, presumed to be transporting troops to Norway to continue the fight there. Three aircraft were lost and fifteen airmen killed. They were the final Bomber Command casualties of the war, for just a few hours later German officers met with General Montgomery on Lüneburg Heath to sign the surrender. In the eleven months since D-Day, the British Army had lost nearly 40,000 men during the invasion campaign. During the same period, Bomber Command had lost 2,128 aircraft, with some 10,000 airmen killed.11

  * * *

  VE Day is imprinted on the minds of those who fought and survived. Les Munro was on leave in London and, he says, ‘the news just seemed to filter through the streets. People started to flood out – a mass of celebrating men and women, cheering, shouting, kissing each other. I think I kissed a few English girls that day! It was a totally amazing, very memorable day.’12

  ‘There was a huge celebration,’ Basil Fish says. ‘I could hardly believe I’d made it through, to be honest. In many ways, I had no right at all to be alive. But there you go. I certainly partook of a few drinks to celebrate my survival!’ People were dancing in the streets of every town and city in Britain, enough alcohol was consumed to refloat the Tirpitz, and the seeds for at least part of the post-war ‘baby boom’ were sown that night. But for others VE Day was no time for celebration. Those grieving for lost loved ones wanted no further reminders of the war, and no street party could ease the pain they felt in their hearts.

  Basil Fish and Lofty Hebbard at a reunion

  For Benny Goodman too, VE Day was very low-key. ‘The news was passed around fairly quickly. I remember the Station Commander addressing us to say that we’d be returning to a “peacetime” RAF: five-day weeks, dining-in nights once a month, parades, sports afternoons. Everything back to normal, just like that! Of course it didn’t happen that way.’

  John Bell was on leave at home in Epsom, Surrey, with his wife Florence and their four-month-old daughter when VE Day was announced. He ‘borrowed’ three huge signal rockets from the Air Traffic Control tower and ran straight ou
t to the back garden and set them off:

  It was a family occasion, with Florence and our daughter, who had been born on 29 December 1944. We were overjoyed and relieved and I began to realise how lucky I was – I’d completed fifty ops and made it through. The war was over. When it had all started, we had no concept that we would be at war for over five years – I thought it would be over in months. I had been a schoolboy back then, but now I was a man. I had responsibilities and life had to go on but I had no idea what was ahead of me. So, amidst the joy and relief, I certainly was thinking, What next?

  A week later, on 15 May 1944, some of the 617 Squadron ground crews were given a so-called ‘Cook’s Tour’ of some of the squadron’s key targets during the war, to show them the destruction they had helped to inflict on the enemy. The round trip took in Hamburg, Brunswick, Hanover, Bielefeld, the Dortmund–Ems Canal, the Möhne dam, Cologne, the Ruhr Valley, Wesel and Ijmuiden, before returning to Woodhall Spa.13 They saw the utter devastation caused by Main Force raids on German cities and the more precise destruction inflicted by 617 Squadron. The giant craters left by Tallboys and Grand Slams were still clearly visible. Some are still evident today.

  By the end of the war, 617 Squadron had flown some 100 special ops, often against crucial targets only they had the expertise and bombing accuracy to attack, and the successes they achieved are reflected in the more than 160 gallantry awards received by members of the squadron. But those successes came at a heavy price. Thirty-four of the squadron’s Lancasters were shot down and almost 200 men had been killed.

  In April 1943, on the eve of the Dams raid, 617 Squadron had a strength of 58 officers and 481 NCOs. Of the 133 men who took part in the Dams raid, 56 died on that raid alone and another 45 perished in subsequent ops with 617 or other squadrons; a total of 101 out of those original 133 Dambusters did not survive to the end of the war, a fatality rate of over 75 per cent. Such a rate of loss even exceeds the horrific figure for Bomber Command as a whole, which out of 116,000 men, lost 55,573 killed, 8,403 wounded and 9,835 as PoWs. On one single night – the disastrous raid on Nuremberg – Bomber Command’s losses exceeded Fighter Command’s during the whole of the Battle of Britain.14 Arguably no military force in history had ever suffered losses on such an overwhelming scale.

  On 22 May 1945, Barnes Wallis was flown out to Bielefeld, and in unseasonably bitter wind and rain he inspected the devastation his Grand Slam bomb had wrought on the previously indestructible viaduct. It was to be almost forty years before the last of the debris was cleared from the site. From the ‘bouncing bomb’ – the Upkeep – through the Tallboy to the Grand Slam, Wallis had been inextricably linked with the story of 617 Squadron, and had earned the right to be talked of in the same breath as its heroes, men like Gibson, Cheshire and Tait. Together they had found ways to revolutionise the air war, striking a series of devastating blows against Nazi Germany that not only arguably shortened the war, but also played a huge part in lifting the morale of the nation and the Allies. After the Flood had come the Victory.

  CHAPTER 16

  Counting the Cost

  The end came quickly for 617 Squadron. In June 1945, Frank Tilley was released from hospital, where he had been recuperating from the broken leg he suffered in the disastrous crash that claimed the lives of two of his crew after the Politz raid. He was sent back to Coningsby, but by then the squadron had already been transferred to RAF Waddington and Tilley was left:

  feeling like a loose end, not tied up. My kit had gone from my hut, cleared away by the Committee of Adjustment – I found it in a hangar with all the other belongings of the dead and missing, piled up in a corner. Lots of things were gone: bits of aircrew kit, my camera. Of course, when I returned my kit to stores I had to pay for the items stolen when I’d been in hospital. I was very bitter about that.

  I hated that time after the war. The squadron had moved on and I was simply forgotten. After being messed about from pillar to post I ended up as a clerk at Catterick! I couldn’t get out of the RAF until February 1947. It was a very sad end to my RAF career; I felt rather let down.1

  That sense of anticlimax also extended to many of his former comrades. At the end of the war, the huge contribution that Bomber Command had made to the overall Allied victory had been both understood and appreciated by the vast majority of the British public, but within weeks that view began to change. Voices were soon raised, questioning the policy of ‘area bombing’ and the targeting of cities and civilians, with the attack on Dresden in particular singled out for fierce criticism. It was even described as ‘a holocaust’, which those who had seen the Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers rightly found an odious comparison.

  Winston Churchill had been among the first to denigrate Bomber Command, albeit by omission. In the dying days of the war in Europe, in March 1945, Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, had eulogised Bomber Command for ‘hampering and enfeebling the power of Germany in every element. Allied bombing is on such a colossal scale that Dr Goebbels has had to admit that “it can hardly be borne”. The swelling crescendo of destruction is engulfing oil plants, tank factories and the communications of the German armies on every front as the Allied armies surge forward into Germany.’2

  Yet, astonishingly, when Churchill made his victory broadcast to the nation, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris listened with ‘mounting incredulity’3 as Churchill’s recital of the key contributions to the victory and the pivotal events of the war, great and small, contained not a single word about Bomber Command.

  That indefatigable warrior Churchill now had a new campaign to pursue. The Soviet Union, until recently a close ally, was now recast as the enemy. West Germany, the hated and recently defeated adversary, had become a new front-line friend in the unfolding confrontation with the Soviet Bloc.

  In that altered landscape, the Second World War bombing campaign against Germany was now an embarrassment, to be ignored or even deprecated. No special campaign medal was struck for Bomber Command air and ground crews, no memorial erected to the more than 55,000 dead pilots, navigators, flight engineers, wireless operators, bomb-aimers and gunners. As the years passed, generations growing up who had never known war came to deplore and even vilify the role that Bomber Command and its commander had played.

  Only in 2012, when a memorial to the men of Bomber Command was finally unveiled in Green Park in London, can the tide be said to have fully turned, though even then, protesters defaced the memorial and Bomber Harris’s statue the following year. Despite such incidents, there has been a growing recognition of the vital role that Bomber Command played in the Allied victory, but for the men who carried out that bombing campaign, not least those of 617 Squadron, a bitter taste remains, especially at the subsequent vandalism of the memorial. ‘Why deface the Bomber Command memorial?’ Benny Goodman says, his voice reflecting his bafflement. ‘Why did they pelt Harris’s statue with paint? It really was terrible. I think some people forget they are free because of the sacrifice that was made seventy years ago.’

  ‘I resent the fact that it took so long for Bomber Command to be recognised,’ Frank Tilley adds. ‘Not me and 617 Squadron, but the guys on Main Force, what they went through, the terrible losses they endured.’

  ‘We were treated as heroes during the war, and I’ve been lucky to have a wonderful family, which has enabled me to keep a sense of perspective about what is important in life,’ Fred Sutherland says, ‘but the way Bomber Command was denigrated after the war appalled me.’

  None of the veterans of 617 the author spoke to gloried in what they had done. They were – and are – only too well aware of the human cost of bombing. Sydney Grimes had been:

  religious before the war, but my faith diminished when I saw the effects of the bombing. After the war, in late 1945, I was an adjutant based near Hamburg and I was shocked by the sight of the city. Whole areas were a wasteland – no bricks, no buildings, nothing, just the entrances to cellars; the houses didn’t exist, but people s
till lived in their cellars. That really affected me. I understood what we had done in Bomber Command. I still thought it was necessary and the only way to defeat the Nazis, but I now saw war in its entirety and how those on the receiving end were affected. I had always understood the bomber, but now I was understanding the bombed. Those sights still live in my memory.

  He also saw for himself the terrible reality of the Nazi regime:

  I was stationed near Belsen. I went past the camp and there wasn’t a sound. It was totally silent, no birds singing or trees rustling. It had an evil feel about it; here was the face of Nazism, the reason for the war. I also had to secure a group of one hundred and fifty SS prisoners, all cast from the same mould: tough, vicious-looking, hard. I thought, Here’s the reason we had to win the war. God help us if we hadn’t!4

  Benny Goodman echoes Grimes’s views. He joined 102 Squadron after VE Day and was:

  flying VIPs around Germany showing them the sites, the ruins, etcetera. I still remember Cologne with the cathedral standing amidst the devastation and shattered buildings – it really did bring it all home. This was the reality of the bombing, but it had to be done. Hitler and his cohorts had to be stopped. My conscience is clear. If you’ve ever visited a concentration camp, or seen the gas chambers, seen the piles of bodies, you’d have no doubt at all that we did the right thing.

  ‘I despair when people say the bombing of the cities like Dresden or Cologne was wrong,’ Tony Iveson said:

  Somehow the minority has such a loud voice and is listened to and promoted in the media, but the general public were with us all the way. That time was unique in the history of war and in the history of aviation. Those four or five years of bombing would never happen again – if it did, there would be no civilisation – but that’s how we waged war at the time; you were in a war to the death. The Nazis wouldn’t have treated us very kindly had they got here. Talk to people in France or Denmark or Norway who lived through it and hear what happened to them. It would have been a very different world if we hadn’t won the war.