by John Nichol
In New Malden the Bartons were not the only family wondering whether a loved one would be at risk that evening. Jocelyn Norfolk was concerned because Flight Engineer George Prince had not come back on leave from 50 Squadron in Skellingthorpe. They had been friendly, nothing more than that, since before the war, though during his last visit, when she saw him in full uniform, she admitted to having ‘a sparkle in my eye’. She and a friend had made a foursome with George and a mate of his, and they had been for a few drinks. ‘We were enjoying life as much as we could.’
Jocelyn worked in the West End of London and knew all about bombing raids and warnings. She had become so blasé that when the sirens sounded she didn’t go down to the shelters because her office was four floors up. But when George failed to appear at the end of March, she called a friend to ask if she had heard from him. She hadn’t either. Jocelyn wondered if she was mistaken about his leave, but she wasn’t. It had been cancelled because of the Nuremberg raid, and the need to have as many aircrew in the air as possible.
At 3 p.m. Sam Harris made his way to the squadron navigation briefing room. Navigators and pilots were normally the first to be told that night’s target at an afternoon pre-briefing, which allowed them time to draw up the necessary charts.
Ranks of wooden trestle tables and fold-up chairs faced a wall draped with sheets concealing a map of Europe marked with the details of the operation. Sam and Chalky sat in the front row, as they always did. ‘You could always tell the newer crews because they made straight for the back of the room, as if trying to hide, while the older hands headed for the front.’ Ken arrived with a group of other pilots, navigators and bomb aimers and came to stand behind them. Harry and Chalky lit up their Capstans and the room steadily filled with cigarette smoke, small talk and nervous laughter.
Harry fished his chart of mainland Europe out of his bag and spread it across the table. He had prepared it a few days before, with anti-aircraft positions marked in red, the territory covered by searchlights in blue. Almost all of the Ruhr, great swathes of the rest of Germany and chunks of France, Belgium and the Netherlands were vibrantly coloured. As they waited for the briefing to begin, Sam shaded in a few more areas, then sat back and admired his handiwork.
The Squadron Navigation Officer bustled in, followed by the Meteorological Officer, and walked to Sam’s table. He picked up the Capstan pack, tapped one out and lit it, inhaling deeply. Then he turned, the cigarette dangling from his lips, and pulled the sheets away.
A line of red string stretched from Elsham, over the North Sea and across much of Germany, then veered south to the target and looped all the way back to base.
‘Gentlemen,’ the Navigation Officer said. ‘Tonight your target is Nuremberg.’
Sam was dismayed. Not because of what Nuremberg was, or what it represented, but because he could see one long, straight red line that passed south of the Ruhr before turning towards the target. An interminable, undeviating leg that would give the German ground radar operators ample time to track the route of the bombers, and give the enemy fighters plenty of chance to vector in on them. ‘The night fighters will be laughing tonight,’ he thought. He prayed for some cloud cover; without it they would be sitting ducks.
The briefing continued. It may have been his imagination, but it seemed longer that night, and to cover every detail of the operation, no matter how minute. Once it ended, he and Chalky sketched out the flight plan while Ken joined the rest of the pilots to discuss tactics.
Navigator Harry Evans was also given advance notice of the raid. A 21-year-old South Londoner, he had been sent to join a new Squadron, 550, at first based at Waltham near Grimsby, then moved a few miles to North Killingholme. His first seven operations were all to Berlin; by March they were battle-hardened and battle-scarred.
Harry had been nominated for an immediate Distinguished Flying Cross for an act of valour during the course of one of those raids, the memory of which was still blurred. The rear gunner had failed to respond on the intercom 20 minutes before they were due to change course. Harry volunteered to weave his way through the cramped bomber in his bulky flying suit, lifejacket and parachute harness, squeezing over the main spar, ducking past the mid-gunner and then crawling on his hands and knees to the doors of the rear gunner’s turret.
When he opened them he found the gunner semi-conscious through lack of oxygen. Harry managed to drag him back through the fuselage and hook him up to an oxygen point. As he did so, the aircraft came under attack. He scrambled back to the rear turret, climbed in and fired a salvo at the marauding Focke Wulf. The attacker wheeled away, according to the mid-upper gunner, with a plume of smoke pouring from his engine. But by this time Harry was suffering from oxygen starvation himself; he staggered back into the main body of the plane and lost consciousness. By the time he came round, after being hooked up to a portable oxygen bottle, and made it back to his desk, he discovered they had gone way off course. When they eventually made it back to base he was able to record one of the few ‘scores’ ever made by a navigator.
At his pre-briefing, Harry’s first reaction when the curtain was drawn back and the target was revealed was relief. At least it’s not bloody Berlin again! Then the more alarming details of the plan were outlined; the straight leg, which was going to take at least an hour, prompted the most concern. Bloody hell, he thought, this looks a bit dodgy … They never flew on an undeviating course for that length of time. ‘Looking at this ruddy great long straight leg,’ he recalled, ‘it immediately struck us as dangerous.’ Then he learned that they were to fly at 18,000 feet rather than the usual 20,000 or 22,000, because there would be thick cloud at that height. Harry still felt uneasy, but as he buried himself in his charts and began planning the route he became more philosophical. They had been here before. There was no such thing as an easy op.
At Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire, Ron Butcher, a young navigator in an all-Canadian crew, shared Harry’s sense of dismay. He had learned to trust his misgivings. During a short break from ops, his roommate, friend and fellow navigator Gord Schacter had gone down with flu and Ron was detailed to take his place on a trip to Essen. He knew from Gord – and from their number of early returns – that the crew had ‘personality and co-ordination difficulties’. ‘I can truthfully say I was never more scared! Thankfully, there was an engine problem and the crew did an early return – again! I certainly had no desire to fly with a crew other than my own, and certainly not that one.’37
Ron had arrived in the UK in January 1943 and became operational in December. Six of their first 10 ops had been raids on Berlin. They had survived; many others they knew had not. It did not take long for the dangers of air warfare to tone down their youthful swagger. They had witnessed death during training, of course; aircraft crashed all the time, taking young lives with them. The realities of combat were even more sobering. Ron and his mates had become quickly accustomed to the idea that their lives might not be long ones.
While they did their best to shrug off their fears and skirt around the subject of mortality, their bluff veneer fell away one evening and the worries poured out. ‘We had not talked about the dangers we faced until the beginning of February. There had been some very heavy casualties. Then one night we were all together in our quarters and someone said, “Maybe I won’t see tomorrow.” It prompted a big discussion. We talked about the possibility of dying, and the prospect that we might never see Canada and our loved ones again. It was quite a stark conversation: we were young men acknowledging how close death was and how grim the reality of our situation was. I think we all acknowledged we were scared, but we decided that we’d soldier on as best we could. There simply was no other choice. Once you’d committed to the training in Canada, there was no way back. Being scared wasn’t going to help much.’
Ron had expected the op to be cancelled because of the full moon right up until the moment the target was unveiled. But the order to stand down never came. The main briefing was at 6 p.m.; Ron and hi
s companions were there, drawing anxiously on their cigarettes, wondering what lay behind the curtain.
The main briefing followed a similar pattern at every base, although each briefing officer would gauge how best to present the objectives, depending on his sense of how the morale of his crews might be affected. He might accentuate the iconic significance of the target, and emphasise the degree to which a successful strike would puncture the enemy’s national spirit. He might point to the number of factories, small and large, that had been turned over to war production.
Ron Butcher
Ron waited patiently through the roll call until the briefing entourage arrived. ‘When the curtain was drawn back to reveal that night’s target there were gasps around the whole room, followed by a stunned silence. I thought, what the hell are they doing now?’
Despite his unease about the route, Ron knew there was little he could do to alter the course of events, so he made sure he paid attention to every scrap of information they were given: the location of German defences, the spoof and diversionary raids that would hopefully distract German attention from the bomber stream, radio codes, Pathfinder marking strategies, the method of attack at the target, and the designated Zero Hour. Then it was time to synchronise watches and the briefing was over.
Ron Butcher and his crew were veterans of 17 operations. Number 18 looked to be as tough as any that had gone before.
Rusty Waughman scanned the battle order for that night in the squadron office at Ludford Magna. He saw his own name on the list of those taking part; he also noticed 26 others, more than the squadron had ever sent on one op. They were making a special effort, involving a total of more than 200 men.
Later that afternoon he and his crew gathered at the briefing, swapping the usual, slightly brittle banter, then falling silent when the senior commanders entered the room. Finally the Intelligence Officer mounted the rostrum. There were some groans, even a few catcalls, when Nuremberg was revealed as the target. Rusty, like most others, remained impassive. On first appearances, there seemed to be nothing unusual about it, other than its unfamiliarity. But soon all eyes were drawn to the red ribbon strung across the centre of the map, passing close – uncomfortably close – to the flak- and searchlight-defended areas near Liège, and squeezing through a narrow corridor between the even more intensive ones around Cologne and Frankfurt. There were also four German night fighter squadrons stationed close by the route of the longest leg.
Rusty’s navigator, Alec Cowan, was as precise as you would expect a London office clerk to be. But Rusty knew he would need all his skills that night to avoid drifting off target and into the Luftwaffe’s lethal aerial embrace, or into a swarm of flak from the ground. Alec had already completed his charts, and his calculations made for disturbing reading; a ‘long leg’, more than 250 miles, through one of the best-defended areas of the Reich. Rusty consoled himself with the met officer’s assurance that they would have the comfort of cloud cover most of the way to the target, and that Norman, their bomb aimer, would then have a clear view of the Aiming Point.
Rusty listened as the specialists took to the rostrum. His worry gave way to an almost supernatural calm; regardless of the cloud cover, he still believed the presence of the moon would make them reconsider the whole enterprise. It just seemed too risky. ‘We believed the op would be cancelled and we thought that right up until the point we were told to start up the engines.’ The Commanding Officer closed by wishing them good luck. He did so before every raid, but for some reason it had extra resonance that night. If the op were to go ahead, certainly they would need it.
Dick Starkey, a pilot from Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and his crew had spent much of the day in an unsettled state, uncertain as to whether they would be going that night. This had nothing to do with moonlight or weather forecasts. They were one of four crews in their squadron at Metheringham, Lincolnshire, who were coming to the end of their tour of operations. If they all flew every raid, their Flight Commander risked losing his most experienced crews in one fell swoop. To make sure that didn’t happen, he had decided to stagger their remaining ops. Dick and his crew had been told to stand down for the previous night’s raid on Brunswick, and that they would stand down the following night as well.
His crew had been dissatisfied all day. No one wanted to sit out an op which might take them closer to the holy grail of 30; they wanted to finish their tour as quickly as possible. They got into a huddle and agreed that Dick should ask the Flight Commander if they could be put on the battle order. It wasn’t their fault the Brunswick op had been cancelled; they had been the stand-down crew for that one, and a different crew should be stood down now.
At first Dick’s request was turned down, but he continued to beat the drum and the Flight Commander eventually changed his mind. They were going to Nuremberg.
Unlike elsewhere, the target map in the Nissen hut which doubled as a briefing room at Metheringham wasn’t concealed. As soon as Dick and his men walked in they could see a ‘nasty red line of tape’ stretching from the east of England to the heart of Germany. His first reaction too was relief that it wasn’t Berlin. He was not alone; some of his crew members were grinning openly, thankful they wouldn’t be going anywhere near the Big City. The fine detail of the raid was more sobering – especially the length of the direct leg that would skirt some areas of heavy defence.
As they left the briefing room for the ritual pre-op meal of eggs and bacon – the eggs were deemed important ahead of a long flight because of their binding properties in the bowel – a few of Dick’s crew were regretting their earlier ebullience. Perhaps being stood down from this one might not have been a bad idea after all.
Lesley ‘Scouse’ Nugent, a mid-upper gunner with 78 Squadron, knew the feeling. From the moment he heard the words, ‘Gentlemen, your target for tonight is Nuremberg,’ a nagging voice in his head told him, ‘Don’t do this one, Scouse – you won’t make it back.’38 He was only 23, but this was to be his 27th op, making him a veteran. If he had not taken a spell of compassionate leave earlier in the tour, he might already have finished and been enjoying six months of non-combat duties, rather than being crammed into a small fetid room with 118 other blokes. Regardless, he had seen and heard enough not to be duped by the emollient words of the briefing officer.
‘It will be bright moonlight over Europe on both the forward and return journeys,’ the met officer told them.
Who’s he bloody kidding? Scouse thought. What return journey?
The end of the briefing was met by silence, only broken by the scrape of a chair as someone finally stood up.
‘This is a bloody big one,’ Scouse heard someone mumble.
‘The brass must be mad to fix this attack without cover,’ added another.
Not everyone experienced the same sense of foreboding. Chick Chandler focused solely on getting the job done; his only concern was how much fuel he needed to get his crew there and back. They were going with a full load, 2,145 gallons, so he knew it was going to be a long one, but he would be scared wherever they might be heading, regardless of the length of individual legs or how much cloud there was likely to be.
CHAPTER 7
Enemy Coast Ahead
Alan Payne
For bomb aimer Alan Payne it was a similar story. He was thankful they wouldn’t be going back to Berlin. The direct leg and the moon were causes for concern, but so far it seemed to be just another op.
He found his girlfriend Pat in the mess. He wasn’t able to talk to her about where they were going – not that he wanted to. The possibility of it being the last conversation they would ever have didn’t alter the fact that Alan just wanted to exchange small talk and pretend nothing was different. When it came time to leave she handed him the flask of coffee she made for him before each raid.
Pilot Officer Jimmy Batten-Smith, a colleague of Rusty Waughman at 101 Squadron, was courting a WAAF who serviced their flying kit named Patricia Bourne. Like Cyril Barton, he had written a l
etter for his parents, who lived in India, in case he did not return; he gave it to his girlfriend before every raid, together with his writing case. That night, after briefing, he did something different. ‘Think of me tonight at one o’clock, will you?’ he asked. Patricia agreed and made a mental reminder to set her alarm clock for that time.39
Rusty Waughman and his crew made for the mess. Curly and Norman, in particular, liked to flirt with the WAAFs who worked there, a last touch of normality before the tension was ratcheted up and they headed to dispersal. The girls knew, of course, what the boys were heading into, and they made it their business to smile and be as friendly as possible. Over the course of three months Rusty and his mates had got to know them well. Sometimes they even managed to bag an extra pre-op egg.
After lingering over each mouthful of their dinner, it was time to get into their flying gear and collect their kit. The temperature at 20,000 feet was rarely forgiving, so most would wear as many layers as possible, including thick woollen stockings and thermal underwear. Rusty Waughman had two pairs of long johns for operations, but only ever wore one ‘lucky’ pair. He never washed them, which guaranteed him all the room he needed in which to get changed. The rest of the crew reckoned that when he peeled them off after a raid they would be able to stand up in his locker by themselves.
Sam Harris’s locker room was unusually crowded, but few spoke; everyone seemed subdued that night. Men fought for space as they climbed into whatever they needed to keep warm. The gunners were the best insulated. Their first layer was an electrically heated flying suit, with a pair of electrically heated slippers that clipped to it. They didn’t always work; sometimes they would be left with one hot foot and one frozen. The next layer was the regulation flying suit, then a canvas fireproof suit. Some found them too restricting and went without, but most wore one: fire was the biggest fear of those on board, and with some justification. If the bomb load went up, the suit was inconsequential, but 2,000 gallons of fuel could burn quickly and fiercely. Once aboard the aircraft, the gunners also wore electrically heated gloves and leather gauntlets, and Mae West life jackets. It was a wonder they could move a muscle.
