by John Nichol
Chalky White, down in the bomb aimer’s position in Sam Harris’s aircraft, saw fire in the sky. The night fighters and the main waves of the bomber stream had reached the radio beacons simultaneously.
‘Bomber going down in flames off the port bow,’ he called.
‘I’ve seen that too,’ Mac said. ‘There’s another going down on the starboard side.’
Sam switched off the tiny light perched on his desk and looked out from behind his curtain.
‘I’ve just seen two more get hit on the port side.’ Eric moved through the aircraft to get a clearer view. The moonlight glanced off the crisp, snow-laden peaks below them. Then there was a blinding flash, the sky turned blood red, and he could see the clear outline of a bomber in flames.
‘Do you want me to log these, Ken?’ he asked, overcome with a profound sense of helplessness. It was the navigator’s job to record and note the approximate position of aircraft losses.
Ken shook his head. ‘It’s just a Scarecrow.’
Rumours had spread amongst the crews that winter of a new type of flak designed to undermine the morale of the raiding crews. The shells burst in a shower of debris at the height of the stream to mimic the appearance of an exploding aircraft. Some were even said to release a succession of small parachutes, to create the illusion of escaping crew. After the war Scarecrows were discovered to have been a myth, and what the men were seeing really was an exploding bomber, but many of the men clawing their way towards Nuremberg that night may have found it easier to believe in it than to accept that they were witnessing the violent death of friends and fellow aviators.
Ken’s crew remained unconvinced.
‘It’s a Scarecrow, I tell you,’ Ken insisted. ‘Now I want you all to shut up about it.’
Sam had to admire what Ken was trying to achieve. The situation was dire; aircraft upon aircraft were being ripped out of the sky; he just wanted them to forget about it, focus on the job in hand and give them all the best chance of survival.
Exploding Allied bombers continued to light up the sky as they fell victim to the feasting night fighters. There was nowhere to hide. Sam returned to his position and closed the curtain, doing his best to banish any thought of what might be happening out there, praying that they would be spared. They climbed to 23,000 feet. Nuremberg was still 55 minutes away.
From the cockpit of his Lancaster towards the middle of the stream, pilot Dick Starkey watched tracers stitch wild patterns across his path. In a matter of minutes – time seemed to have lost all meaning – he counted 30 bombers falling from the sky. ‘I had never seen anything like this, and certainly not with as much clarity. The brightness of the moon meant that you could see it all in great detail. Fire would rip through the aircraft until it reached the bomb bay, which would blow up and shower debris around like flaming confetti. The flames died as what remained of the aircraft plummeted to the ground; then there would be another massive explosion on impact.’ So many bombers had fallen that the earth was ablaze.
To give them the best chance of seeing and avoiding the night fighters, Dick turned into a ‘banking search’, veering steeply to port for 15 seconds and then banking to starboard to regain course. He had been on bad trips before, including Leipzig, but this was already turning out to be one of the worst.
With the help of his navigator, Dick had edged 10 miles north of the track, constantly banking and searching for safety, when a shadow appeared at their side.
‘Corkscrew!’ The warning came from one of the gunners.
Dick thrust the bomber into a turning dive then hauled back on the controls and reversed into a climb in the opposite direction. He kept repeating the manoeuvre, sweat pouring off him from the sheer physical effort of throwing a heavy, bomb-laden aircraft around the sky. The rear gunner tried to fire at the enemy fighter as the g-force slammed his head into his chest.
When Dick brought them level again, the intercom was silent apart from the rasping breaths of his crew as they tried to re-inflate their lungs and regain their bearings.
The rear gunner finally spoke. ‘All clear …’
The words had barely left his lips when another fighter was at their heel. Dick hurled the aircraft into a corkscrew once again, twisting down and then back up. They resumed course when the sky was clear. Dick started to bank, eyes peeled, hoping for some remission. But it was never long before the rear gunner cried out and the whole frantic, coiling manoeuvre would begin once more.
They were now 60 miles short of Nuremberg, and the endless, energy-sapping evasive action seemed to have worked. They were off course, but they were safe. Dick dared to believe that they would make it to the target. The bombing run always presented its own set of potentially lethal challenges, so in this brief moment of respite he tried to catch his breath and regain some strength.
The next night fighter attacked without warning. Muffled by his helmet and the drone of the four great Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, the noise of its shells piercing the fuselage was like that of a peashooter pelting an overcoat. Then Dick saw vivid flashes of tracer flash across the space above his bomb aimer’s head.
The shock only lasted a few moments, but that was long enough for the port wing and engines to burst into flames. The Lancaster’s nose fell and it started to plummet. Dick’s flight engineer tried to feather the engines and help him with the controls, but their dive became steeper with every passing second.
‘Abandon aircraft!’ he yelled across the intercom.
He heard the bomb aimer acknowledge the order. The rear gunner was trapped in his turret. The port engine was no longer supplying it with power, and he was unable to swivel round and scramble back into the fuselage. His only chance of survival was to reach the manual controls which would allow him to turn and fall straight out into the night sky. Dick had no idea if the gunner even had a parachute within reach.
The mid-upper gunner and the wireless operator did not speak. Both would have been in the direct path of the incoming rounds.
The controls went limp in Dick’s hands. The blazing aircraft was hurtling towards the ground at 300 mph. His only concern now was to buy every precious second he could, to give his crew a chance to leap to safety. His flight engineer appeared at his shoulder and snatched a parachute from the rack at their side. The g-force glued Dick to his seat, but he struggled with his ’chute and managed to connect one of its hooks to his harness.
Peering through the canopy, he was unable to distinguish ground from sky. The engineer and navigator were at the escape hatch, ready to go, but Dick couldn’t move a muscle; he didn’t even fumble with his parachute. He had felt no fear in the time since they had been hit, but now he was truly terrified. The plane was going to crash and he wasn’t going to get out. In the blink of an eye his life would be over.
He sat waiting for the impact. I haven’t even had a chance to pray, he thought.
There was a mind-numbing explosion as the Lancaster’s full bomb load and 1,500 gallons of high-octane fuel detonated. Dick’s head was forced back into his shoulders. He felt as though he was being lifted from the cockpit, through the Perspex canopy in front of him, soaring upwards.
Then he lost consciousness.
Scouse Nugent was a mid-upper gunner with 78 Squadron. He and his crew were approaching Marburg, halfway between the north-west German border and Nuremberg, when a Junkers 88 catapulted towards them, guns blazing, shells slamming relentlessly into their airframe.
‘Bandit at rear port – dive to port!’ Scouse screamed.
Harry Hudson acted immediately, throwing the plane out of the path of the attacking fighter before he started to corkscrew.
When he had corrected their course once more, Harry checked that everyone was OK. His voice was supernaturally calm. The fighter appeared to have gone in search of another target, but Scouse did not relax. He could see aircraft being blasted from the sky all around them. Their safety depended on his vigilance.
Knowing an attack was most likely to come f
rom behind them, he encouraged the rear gunner to watch the sky below them whilst he scoured every inch of the space above. For five long minutes they maintained their vigil. No one spoke; the only sound was that of the Merlin engines and the blood rushing in their ears.
Another fighter swung into view and Harry repeated the corkscrew. When they resumed course Scouse could see the port wing was on fire. There was no time to panic. He turned his attention back to the sky. Another Junkers, slightly above and to the rear, was heading straight towards them. Scouse wrenched his guns around, cursing himself for not spotting it sooner. In a split second the enemy was in his sights.
He squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He followed the fighter as it passed them. Pressed the trigger. Nothing. Had the guns frozen, Scouse wondered? Or had the earlier damage caused an electrical fault?
He glanced at the port wing. It was now burning fiercely. The nose of the plane had dipped. It was starting to go down.
‘What’s happening, Skipper?’ he said over the intercom.
There was no answer.
He asked again. Complete silence. It was like the Marie Celeste.
He slipped off his helmet; forgetting to do up the chinstrap on take-off saved him a crucial few seconds. He dropped it on the floor and headed for the cockpit. As he did so, he started to feel light-headed. By taking off his helmet he had removed his own oxygen supply. He slumped to the floor, unable to see, using his outstretched hand to try and work out where he was. His fingertips brushed against a parachute and, despite his grogginess, he managed to clip it on to his harness.
He forced open his eyes and peered along the fuselage. The others must all have been killed by the ceaseless onslaught of the Luftwaffe. The port engine was still burning. Smoke caught in the back of his throat and the intense heat of the flames seared his skin.
He felt himself getting weaker and weaker, but somehow forced himself to his knees. He scrabbled for the escape hatch between his turret and the rear gunner’s but was sent tumbling backwards along the plane. He slammed against the rear turret and shook his head, trying to clear it. What was he doing there? It dawned on him with agonising slowness: the plane was in its final dive, plunging vertiginously to earth, and he was pinned to the rear turret doors by the enormous forces created by the aircraft’s 300 mph plunge. But Scouse refused to give up. He summoned every last ounce of his remaining strength and willed himself forwards.
At last he found a handle: the door to his turret. What he thought was the floor was in fact the ceiling. One twist and he was sucked from the aircraft ‘like a vacuum cleaner picking up a fragment of dust’.
The cold, fresh air brought him round. A different kind of panic kicked in. Was his parachute working? He started to tug frantically on the ripcord. He glanced upwards, desperate to see a mushroom of silk billowing above him. Nothing. He wrenched it again. It wouldn’t open. He was terrified, unable to believe that he had escaped from a burning plane only to find his parachute couldn’t save him.
‘God, it won’t open!’ he shouted over and over, in increasing panic, as the ground rushed towards him – a plea to a deity in whom he didn’t believe, but whose help he urgently needed.
Amid the panic, a moment of clarity: he had been tugging the carrying handle. Now he found the ripcord. There was a jolt as the ’chute opened and slowed his fall. In the distance he could see a burning plane spinning to the ground.
Scouse smashed through a tree. Branches clawed at him as he tumbled towards the ground. The force of the impact broke his ankle. But he was alive.
CHAPTER 10
One Hour of Death
Roger Coverley
In all of his flying days Roger Coverley had never experienced such relentless attack, or witnessed such devastation. As the sky raged with fire and combat, and he flew through the thick of it in his Halifax, Roger started to hum ‘Paper Doll’, a popular ballad of the time. Tracer ripped into a nearby plane and it fell from view, leaving a trail of fire and a cascade of scorching debris. But Roger carried on. ‘And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes / Will have to flirt with dollies that are real –’
The voice of his rear gunner over the intercom cut short his song.
‘Fighter on our tail! Corkscrew!’
Roger reacted immediately, in tandem with his gunners. With a few well-aimed salvos they drove the Ju 88 away, but not before the fighter had scored a hit on the starboard engine and their mid-section had started to burn.
As a precaution the flight engineer passed Roger his parachute before he went aft and checked the damage. In the process of shaking off the fighter, they had lost height and speed. Roger set about getting them back on course.
As they sighed with relief, Otto Kutzner’s Messerschmitt 110 stole unseen beneath them. His upward-firing cannon blew a hole in the Halifax’s starboard wing, ruptured its fuel lines and started a furious blaze. There had been no warning calls over the intercom, no flashes of tracer; only the vibration of the shells tearing into their airframe.
‘I’ve been hit,’ the rear gunner yelled.
Roger wrestled helplessly with the controls, fighting to keep them level and airborne. The aircraft was not responding to its rudder and was losing speed. It had started to climb and, no matter what he did to try and force the nose down, it refused to respond. The fire rampaged along the starboard wing and began to consume them. ‘It all happened in seconds; there was nothing I could do. The aircraft was in flames and it was uncontrollable.’
‘Get out!’ Roger shouted. ‘Abandon aircraft!’ He stayed at the controls, trying to keep them level to give the crew the best chance of baling out. They only had seconds before the plane fell into a fatal spin or blew up. Strangely, Roger felt no sense of panic as the heat in the cockpit grew. He just thought: the CO is going to be pretty annoyed when he finds out I’ve lost The Royal Barge …
A piece of debris struck him in the face, knocking off his oxygen mask and temporarily blinding him. Roger managed to unstrap, haul himself from his seat and clip on his parachute. As he did so, he tumbled backwards down the steps towards the escape hatch in the nose.
It must have been open. All Roger felt was the sensation of falling, the wind rushing past his ears and the cold air on his face. He fumbled for the handle of his parachute, but couldn’t find it. It was on upside down. His first instinct was not fear but anger. ‘Here I was falling through the sky towards German soil and I couldn’t open my bloody parachute!’ He scrabbled around, trying to find the handle. There it was. He gave it a tug and felt the jerk of the parachute, and the sudden blissful sensation of floating rather than falling.
After the fire and the fury of the preceding moments, the sky was deathly quiet.
The surviving members of Roger Coverley’s crew had his bravery to thank. He had bought them time. Meanwhile on another crippled Lancaster the mid-upper gunner and the pilot sacrificed the chance to save themselves by choosing instead to try and free the rear gunner from his turret. It cost them their lives. The bodies of the three men were found in the wreckage of the crashed aircraft.
Tom Fogaty’s Lancaster was intercepted by a fighter as they crossed the German border, but he decided to fly on to Nuremberg. The 115 Squadron pilot initially believed that his aircraft was still functioning normally, but then quickly realised that the damage was worse than he had thought. The heady stench of fuel and oil filled the cabin and they had descended 5,000 feet in 10 minutes. Every passing second cost them height.
He ordered the bomb aimer to release his load and felt the control column push back against his palms once the explosives were gone. He asked his navigator for a homeward track and started his turn. The aircraft had stopped losing height, but because of the head wind they were now losing air speed.
A blast of flak turned the night sky ochre around them. Tom felt the aircraft pitch and roll as the shrapnel struck their flank. Once they were clear he asked the engineer for a report on the damage. The news was good: a few
holes in the airframe but, once again, none fatal. Tom wasn’t convinced; the controls were becoming increasingly unresponsive. Suddenly they went limp in his hands.
The aircraft fell into a steep dive. Tom wrestled with the controls but the bomber was already down to 2,500 feet and he knew there was no way they would make it back to England. He ordered his crew to clip on their parachutes and bale out.
The rear gunner was stuck in his turret. The mid-upper gunner crawled along the fuselage and turned the turret manually until his mate was facing him. He gave him a thumbs-up before he fell backwards into the night. Once he had gone, the mid-upper joined the navigator and wireless operator at the rear hatch.
Only Tom and his flight engineer were left. The plane was down to 1,000 feet; if they were going to jump, they had to do it now. But the flight engineer’s parachute was jammed under his seat. ‘Quick, take mine,’ Tom said. ‘There’s no time to lose.’
The engineer paused; if he took it, there was virtually no chance that Tom would survive.
For a moment the two men just looked at each other. ‘Go,’ Tom insisted.
The engineer hesitated briefly, then clipped on the ’chute and nodded his farewell. He crouched down and disappeared through the hatch.
Tom struggled back to the cockpit and turned on his landing lights. The snow-covered ground loomed out of the darkness; only 500 yards away and closing in. He grabbed the controls, but there was still no response. The only sound he heard above the shriek of the Merlins was his own breath over the intercom. He was down to 200 feet and the trees and the hedgerows were rushing towards him. He cut the engines, closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer. As the plane smashed against the unyielding earth he felt a fierce pain in his forehead, a sense of floating, then darkness.
When he came to, he was lying in the snow 50 yards from the wreckage of his bomber.52
Cy Barton and his crew flew on ‘unmolested’. The sky was a tangled web of tracer fire, but he kept their Halifax straight, entreating all on board to keep their eyes peeled for enemy fighters. Two searchlight beams appeared in front of them, so bright they were temporarily blinded. They all held their breath as, with almost surgical precision, Cyril managed to find the narrow gap between the beams.
