by John Nichol
Gerhard Wollnik, based at Stendal, 125 km west of Berlin, with the 1st Fighter Division, scored his first kill to the tune of Schräge Musik in his Messerschmitt 110 on the night of 19 February, during the infamous raid on Leipzig. ‘At last, our Wireless Operator, Fischer, identified a clear blip on his SN-2 radar set. It flew at our height and some 300 metres in front of us; we could already feel the turbulence from its propellers. Slowly we approached the enemy aircraft.
‘We thought it was a Lancaster, judging from its green exhaust flames, which were clearly visible. If it were a Halifax, the flames would have been more reddish. Our pilot Reschke pushed our Me 110 down to about 100 metres under the Lancaster. It was a giant bird, with gun barrels protruding from its defensive turrets. The Lancaster crew had not yet spotted us. Complete silence reigned in our machine. Our pilot had decided upon carrying out an attack with his obliquely mounted guns, from a position underneath the bomber. The two 2 cm cannons had been installed very close to my gunner’s position. The barrels of the guns pointed upwards and forwards at an angle of 80 degrees. At this time, Schräge Musik was still top secret, and in the case of being diverted to a strange airfield we had orders to hide them from view.
‘The moment of the attack was now drawing near: Hauptmann Reschke slowly approached the enemy bomber from underneath. Our Me 110 now hung some 50 metres underneath the Lancaster, and still we had not been spotted. Then a short burst from the oblique guns; in all, Hauptmann Reschke only fired nine 2 cm rounds. The shells struck home between the two engines in the right wing, and immediately the bomber started burning fiercely. It trailed a long sheet of flames, which covered almost the complete fuselage.
‘The aircraft lost height at once, and plunged towards us in a right-hand turn. Hauptmann Reschke swerved to starboard to avoid a collision. The flames burned bright in a yellow-red and trailed back towards the blue-white-red roundel. They clearly illuminated the squadron code on the fuselage too; I could make out the capital letters AR, and made a note of this. A few minutes later, we watched how the Lancaster hit the ground in a sheet of flames … Not one of the seven-man crew had been able to bale out of their doomed Lancaster. We had no idea why, as Hauptmann Reschke had deliberately not aimed at the cockpit area.’45
Bruno Rupp remembers that he aimed for the fuel tank rather than the bomb bay or the cockpit to give those men on board the bomber a reasonable chance of escape from their stricken aircraft. ‘My countrymen were badly affected by the large number of aircraft attacking their country and the bombs they dropped which destroyed so much of their towns and cities. There was a lot of anger towards the aircrews. But personally I certainly didn’t feel any satisfaction when shooting down enemy aircraft. I had too much respect for them and their bravery.’
Most of the Junkers 88, Focke Wulf 190 and Messerschmitt 110 pilots were young men, not unlike those they were hunting down. Some had already become heroes among the German public. The highest-scoring night fighter ace, Major Heinz-Wolfgang Schnauffer, had achieved legendary status as the ‘Night Ghost of St Trond’ (after the name of his Belgian base). He was to be credited with 121 kills, most of them in a Me 110.
Schnauffer had honed his combat skills during daylight sorties early in the war. Men with the skills to pilot a night fighter in pitch darkness in all-weather conditions were in short supply by the time of the Nuremberg raid. The elite campaigners with dozens of scores to their name were increasingly outnumbered by untested newcomers who would be lucky to survive a handful of missions.
Many of the less experienced Luftwaffe pilots were killed in accidents. Those who survived to face the firepower of the Allied bombers were often shot down whilst striving too eagerly for their first kill. Others were less keen to stray into the sights of the British gunners. When Josef Scholten, a radar operator, signed a form ‘voluntarily’ joining the Luftwaffe, eight of his companions refused to do so. They were marched ceaselessly, day and night, around the square until they came to see the wisdom of devoting themselves to the service of the Führer, the Fatherland and its people by taking to the skies.
At ‘blind-flying’ school in Belgrade, Josef and his fellow recruits were made brutally aware of the dangers of training over occupied territory when a Heinkel 111 went missing with four trainees and two instructors on board. They spent two days searching the countryside without success. When the wreckage of the plane was eventually found, so were the men’s bodies. All six had survived the landing, but had their throats cut by the local Resistance.46
Reg Payne
The fighter crews were also handicapped by the lack of an aircraft designed for their particular environment. The Messerschmitt 110 still led the way, but the new technology – such as the upward-firing guns and SN-2 radar – increased its weight and made it less easy to handle. The Heinkel 219 had these features incorporated into its design, but had only just started to roll off the production line.
The high death toll, especially amongst new recruits, poor training, ageing aircraft and the danger and stress of flying at night, still failed to dent morale. ‘It was more of a family than a military unit; [it had] an air of relaxed informality not seen in any other branch of service, with the possible exception of the U-boat crews, who also lived in close proximity and shared the dangers of their work.’47
The night fighter crews were the last line of defence against the devastating destructive power of the Allied bombers, the last hope of survival for the men, women and children in the cities beneath them. As the men of Bomber Command drew strength and courage by remembering the Blitz, the night fighter crews were desperate to prevent more of the carnage that had been inflicted on Hamburg or Berlin.
During the first three months of 1944 they had shot down more than 750 Allied bombers and accounted for most of the 78 that failed to return from the ill-fated raid on Leipzig. During the Berlin raid eight days earlier, Martin Becker had recorded the most kills in a single night: six Lancasters in the space of 38 minutes.
An Oberleutnant with 1st Division, Becker was so highly rated that he was permitted to operate in challenging weather conditions that meant others were grounded – but like Bruno Rupp he believed the chances of a raid that night were minimal. In the Battle Opera Houses across Germany, however, the mood was changing. The German listening posts had picked up a mass of radio activity in England during the course of the afternoon, usually a good indicator of an impending raid.
Only a year before, General ‘Beppo’ Josef Schmidt had led Goering’s Panzer Division in Tunisia, but he was now commander of 1 Fighter Corps, south of Berlin – the man in charge of the night fighter divisions. Late in the evening Schmidt was informed that a substantial force was heading across the North Sea. Despite the moon, the British were coming. He and his staff had spent the last few hours poring over the incoming intelligence reports, determined to identify their target.
Further reports indicated that the bomber stream was forging a route that would take it to Hamburg or Berlin. For the time being, at least, the ‘spoof’ diversion – the force that would be dropping mines in Heligoland – was working. Then news came through at 11 p.m. of another stream gathering off the south-east coast of England. Schmidt and his team had to decide which of the two provided the real threat.
Generalmajor Walter Grabmann had received the same intelligence in the operations room of the 3rd Fighter Division near Arnhem. He was in no doubt: the southerly stream heading towards him and the Ruhr valley was the main force, not the one to the north.
At 23,000 feet the bomber stream was making steady progress. The first wave had reached the German border untroubled by enemy fighters. Despite the occasional spikes appearing on Ted Manners’s ABC screen, ‘uneventful’ was the word on Rusty Waughman’s mind. The moonlight was now so bright that he could read his instruments by it – but maybe this was not going to be a bad one after all.
Then the infrequent spikes on Ted’s cathode ray screen became a mass.
Bruno and his comrades contin
ued at the card table late into the evening. Their stomachs well lined with sausage and potatoes, they remained convinced that the order to stand down was imminent.
‘Bereitschaft!’
Readiness! The scramble alert banished further thought of sleep. In an instant they gathered their caps and gloves, headphones and microphones and hurtled across the tarmac. Bruno and his two radio operators, Hans Eckert and Gerd Gerbhardt – who shared his birthday – and their mechanic, Albert Biel, quickly took their positions in the Junkers Ju 88 G6 and waited for take-off.
The signal came at 11.25 p.m. All Bruno Rupp knew at that point was that a vast RAF bomber stream was heading for Germany, its target unknown.
Generalmajor Grabmann had ordered every available night fighter to gather at the Ida beacon, south-east of Cologne. After he’d shared his assessment with Schmidt, the rest of the Tame Boar groups were sent to join them as soon as possible. Those too far from Ida were instructed to head for another beacon north of Frankfurt, codenamed Otto.
Ten-year-old Friedrich Ziegler was getting ready for bed in Kleingeschaidt, a small village near Lauf, nine miles from Nuremberg. It had been a long day. As usual, lessons had started at eight and finished at one, but several hours of gymnastics had followed, to satisfy the school’s commitment to developing healthy young people for the future strength of the Reich.
When Friedrich got back to his father’s farm, he had to carry out some odd jobs and run errands for his father before he was allowed to play with Lux, the family Rottweiler. The dog talked a good fight, but whenever the air-raid sirens sounded Lux was the first to seek shelter in the basement. Twelve of them lived in the house: Friedrich’s family, his grandparents, some farmhands and four French prisoners-of-war who worked the land instead of being confined to a camp, and displayed enviable culinary skills whenever they were presented with a freshly killed rabbit. They all had to share the shelter, too. Friedrich hoped that night would be quiet and he could sleep in his bed. He did not want to have to cram into the sweaty, fetid cellar.
Seven miles east of Nuremberg, in Eschenau, Fritz Fink was also thinking of getting some sleep. Thirteen-year-old Fritz was prohibited from going to school because his parents were not Nazi party members, so he helped out on the farm instead. In private both his mother and father spoke disparagingly of their leaders. A relative of theirs, a police captain named Friedrich Fink, had been shot during Hitler’s attempted putsch of 1923. As far as they were concerned, the Führer and his acolytes were obsessed with their own power and cared little for the wellbeing of the people. But these were words and thoughts Fritz dared not repeat anywhere else.48
Unlike Friedrich Ziegler, Fritz Fink was not too disturbed by the raids. His family’s farm was near the Schlossberg, a 50-metre hill with a panoramic view of the surrounding area. When the air-raid sirens sounded, he and his family would race up the slope to watch the flak and flares light up the sky. As their bombs never fell anywhere near his house, Fritz felt little hatred towards their British opponents. At least they worked by night, unlike the Americans, who bombed by day and appeared to relish targeting trains and vehicles filled with people.
If anything, Fritz felt sympathy for the bomber crews, especially the poor souls trapped inside the balls of flame he saw spiralling to the ground. Like most German boys, he had visited the crash sites; he had seen the mangled wreckage of the enemy aircraft and the broken bodies of the airmen and felt nothing but compassion and sadness for their families.49
CHAPTER 9
The Long Leg
Harry Evans’s crew
Harry Evans peered from behind his curtain at the streams of vapour pouring from the bombers’ exhausts. The moisture in the smoke and fumes emitted by the aircraft cooled rapidly as it met the freezing air and formed condensation trails as visible as tramlines across the velvet sky. What a silly lot of bastards … He cursed those behind the decision to send them up on such a clear night.
To rid themselves of the trails that would lead the night fighters straight to them, Harry knew they needed to alter their height. They descended to 12,000 feet, even though that was where the flak was likely to be fiercest. Still the contrails billowed from the rear of the plane, a clear invitation to attack, so they started to climb instead, and finally reached an altitude where they were less visible.
Harry had already decided to overshoot the turning point at Charleroi; when they changed course they would be between five and 10 miles south of the track, and so avoid the heavy defences around Aachen. This was no time to follow their brief to the letter.
John Chadderton of 44 Squadron was ahead of Harry Evans, near the front of the stream. His crew’s job was to record the wind speed and feed it back to base, where it was processed and retransmitted to the rest of the pack. His flight engineer nudged him and pointed below them, to where a fellow Lancaster was ‘leaving four long white fingers which were twisted into a cloudy rope by the slipstream’.50
Over the intercom, his young Canadian mid-upper gunner asked if their engines were working. There was smoke streaming from them, he said. The answer came from the rear gunner, a dry Scot who provided the perfect antidote to the Canadian’s over-excitement. ‘Wheesht yer bletherin’ – they’re contrails!’
The dose of crisp Scottish realism did little to soothe John’s nerves. ‘We had never made them before, although we had often admired the pretty patterns left by the USAAF on their daylight raids 10,000 feet above us.’ Chadderton had no doubt the cause of the problem was the absence of cloud. For the previous five months they had flown blind through a range of different densities. ‘Despite the constant anxiety of icing and flak, this damp cloak of darkness was just what we burglars needed to enable us to creep in and creep out again.’
The first skirmish of the night took place almost by accident. A German fighter pilot on his way to the beacon near Cologne was alerted by his gunner, who had spotted the outline of a bomber before the crew had even activated their on-board radar. As they started to turn they saw another. The radar immediately picked up three more targets. They headed for the nearest and delivered a blast of Schräge Musik which set the wing ablaze. The stricken Lancaster – the first British victim of the raid – crashed in a ball of flame five minutes later, but the crew managed to bale out before they hit the ground.
Jack Watson was at the front of the stream with the Pathfinder force, tasked with supporting those who were marking the target. As they reached German territory, three Mosquitoes peeled away on a spoof raid. It was soon clear they would not be completing this operation undetected; the moon above and the searchlights below them formed an alleyway of light. Their gunners scoured the sky behind them.
‘I can see an attack,’ said the first to break the silence.
‘I can see another,’ the rear gunner echoed.
Jack and his crew had been fortunate enough to slip through before the enemy had a chance to scramble. Now more than 200 night fighters were in the air, heading towards Otto and Ida to await further orders – orders which did not have time to materialise before the British bombers had flown straight into their deadly embrace.
Between crossing the German border and passing the Rhine, the stream had lost 10 Lancasters and two Halifaxes. One Lanc, on its 29th and penultimate op, had been mistaken for the enemy by the rear gunner of a ‘friendly’ Halifax. A long burst of tracer strafed the unfortunate aircraft’s engines; only four of the seven men on board escaped before it hit the ground. The winds blew a second off course, towards the heavily defended town of Coblenz; it was struck by flak and went down with all hands near the village of Rübenach at 12.15 a.m. Both were from Rusty Waughman’s 101 Squadron.
Oberleutnant Martin Drewes, one of Germany’s finest pilots, was among the first in the air that night. The son of a pharmacist, he had been through officer school with the army before switching to the Luftwaffe. Since then he had won an Iron Cross and, more recently, a German Cross in Gold for repeated acts of bravery in combat.
He took off from Loan-Athies in France shortly after 11 p.m. with two other crew members crammed into his twin-engine Messerschmitt 110. Directly behind him was his radar operator, Georg Petz. The pair had 38 kills to their name. Their air-gunner was huddled to Petz’s rear in a small glasshouse with two 2 cm drum-fed cannons at his knees, each holding 75 rounds of ammunition, built into the back of the cramped cabin and aimed upwards: Schräge Musik.
Drewes pointed his aircraft across Belgium and headed for the Ida beacon. Ground Control’s running commentary told him to take an easterly course. He saw a bomber above them almost instantly, but their relative speeds were such that he was unable to turn and give chase.
‘Not to worry,’ he said to Petz. ‘Where there is one, there will be others.’
Petz switched on his radar screen. Drewes was right. Three clear blips appeared on the screen. A few seconds later they could see a Lancaster silhouetted in the moonlight. As it flew on, heedless of the threat, Drewes manoeuvred into position beneath its massive belly. Mindful that the full bomb load only metres above his head could destroy them as well as their prey, Drewes delayed their attack until the air-gunner could target the bomber’s engines. After a prolonged burst of Schräge Musik he dived away to safety as flames started to consume the wounded Lancaster then tore it apart.
Ten minutes later Drewes slid his Messerschmitt beneath a second Lancaster. His gunner’s cannon jammed, but he still managed to score a hit. The bomber tried to dive to avoid further damage, but its starboard wing was soon ablaze. Georg Petz watched as its nose started to fall. ‘As Drewes pulled away, the Lancaster blew up, showering the sky with thousands of fiery fragments … Around us, bombers were dropping like flies sprayed with an insecticide gun.’51
