by John Nichol
Ken felt for the bomb jettison switch in case Mac had a problem. He scanned the temperature gauges. Full power might be needed at any time now. The gunners swung their turrets, eyes peeled for any night fighters that might be behind them or lurking beneath. Luff peered out of the navigator’s astrodome. Everyone was on alert, looking for the approaching shadow which spelled death.
Chalky called, ‘Open the bomb doors.’
Ken pressed the release button. ‘Bomb doors open and checked open.’
‘Bomb doors checked open visually,’ Chalky replied.
They were now within range of the anti-aircraft guns. As they flew through the bursting shells, the air around them seethed with light and sound so loud they could hear it over the vast rumble of the engines. Everyone bar the bomb aimer and the pilot remained silent, holding their breath, willing the plane through the smoke-filled sky, waiting for that moment when their bombs were released and they could turn for home and safety.
‘Left, left …’ Chalky called. Then, ‘R-r-right … Steady … Steady …’
Sam wanted this bit to be over, for them to drop the bombs and get the hell out of there. But he knew Chalky had things under control. ‘Bombs away, hold it steady. Jettison bars across. All bombs gone. Close the bomb doors.’
Freed of thousands of pounds of explosive, the Lancaster became an infinitely lighter beast, leaping up and away.
‘Bomb jettison buttons pushed. Bomb doors closing,’ Ken replied.
‘Bomb doors checked closed,’ Chalky said. ‘Flash bomb has operated; the camera has turned over.’
If the camera had operated successfully there would be photographic proof that they had attacked the target, and of the approximate position the cookie had detonated.
The fire and fury from below and the looming shadows of the night fighters had ramped up the tension in the aircraft during the bombing run to an almost unbearable pitch. Luff now slid round his desk and lifted up the left ear flap of Sam’s helmet. ‘Thank God that Chalky didn’t do a dummy run. I would’ve shat myself.’
Sam smiled. Their mission had been accomplished. Now all they had to do was get home in one piece. But they knew they were far from safe. The Luftwaffe would still be on the prowl.
CHAPTER 12
The Bombing Run
Ron Butcher (back row, far left), Sutherland crew, 1944
The alarm clock beside Section Officer Patricia Bourne’s bed at her quarters in Ludford Magna woke her at 1 a.m. She had a promise to keep. Her boyfriend, Jimmy Batten-Smith, had made a particular request earlier that evening as he handed her his writing case and papers. She now sat up and spent a few moments thinking of him, picturing his face and saying a silent prayer for his safety. Then she went back to sleep.
Over Thüringen Wald, Jimmy’s mate Rusty Waughman had made the turn for the last leg of the journey. As they approached the target Rusty was punishingly aware that the endgame was not going to plan. He could see that a number of the markers dropped by the Pathfinders were over the target, but by no means all. ‘Many others fell further to the east, in particular over the small town of Lauf …’
Friedrich Ziegler’s farmhouse was in the village of Kleingeschaidt, not far from Lauf. He had been woken by the drone of hundreds of approaching engines. The farmhouse beds were reserved for the women, while the men and boys slept wherever was cosiest and most comfortable. But as soon as he heard the bombers in the sky Friedrich threw back his blanket alongside the still-warm oven and ran to the shelter in the basement. His heart hammered against the walls of his chest.
The night was bitterly cold, but the air inside the basement was thick with sweat and fear. It was so dark they were unable to see their hands in front of their faces. All 12 of them were crammed into this confined space: Friedrich’s mother and father and grandparents alongside the farmhands and French PoWs who chattered away excitedly in a language the young German boy still found bewildering.
They were all wrapped in blankets, perched on suitcases, leaning back against the cold, bare sandstone walls. As the aircraft grew nearer, Lux, the family Rottweiler, started to whine at Friedrich’s feet. When the boy heard the unmistakable whistle of falling bombs, a combination of fear and excitement coursed through him. He expected one to blast through the roof any second now and bury them beneath a heap of rubble. He could hear the older ones mumbling prayers in the darkness.
They often heard the British planes overhead and always had to take shelter until they had passed. The war had become a daily part of his and his friends’ life – the weekly Hitler Youth meetings never allowed them to forget what the hated British and their bomb-laden planes were doing to their homeland – but Friedrich’s village had not been hit before.
That night was different. He heard the Allied aircraft screaming from the sky, and felt the ground shake as they piled into it. If he got out of the cellar alive, Friedrich knew there would be a host of wrecks to explore in the morning. His father seemed to sense what he was thinking. ‘Don’t go anywhere near them!’ he hissed. ‘There may be men still alive near them and they might kill you!’
Right at that moment Friedrich had no intention of leaving the safety of the shelter. The bombs had started to fall – and they were not falling on distant Nuremberg; they were falling on his village.
Zero Hour had passed and only three aircraft at the front of the main stream had been able to drop their bombs on time. Over the next five minutes only another 33 managed to do so; far fewer than planned.
Rusty and his crew were bang on schedule. Norman, whose job it was to unleash their explosives, relished each second of this phase, but it was the most nerve-racking part of the operation for the rest of the crew. Rusty did what he could to try and keep the plane straight and level through the curtain of exploding flak. From the nose, Norman coaxed his pilot into position. The cloud beneath them formed an impenetrable shield over the city, but Norman’s patience was rewarded. Once over the aiming point, he spotted what he believed to be Pathfinder target indicators through a small break in the cumulus and discharged their cargo.
‘Bombs gone,’ he said. It was exactly 1.17 a.m. As the 4,000-pound bomb left the bay, the aircraft surged upwards. Norman checked his control panel to make sure all the bombs were gone. In the distance, east of the target, a huge explosion lit up the sky. Another bomber had scored a direct hit on an ammunition wagon on a military train en route between Nuremberg and Lauf. Exhausted, thankful, and desperate to leave the carnage behind, Rusty turned A Wing and a Prayer for home.
Harry, stuck in his turret at the tail end of the bomber, was increasingly concerned. He hadn’t yet informed his skipper, but his electrically heated suit had stopped working. The biting wind, accelerated by their own slipstream, was blasting straight through a gap in the Perspex canopy. Because it regularly frosted up or became smeared with dirt and oil, a protective section of the Perspex had been removed from all rear turrets. The gunners’ visibility had been improved, but it meant they were exposed to temperatures of minus 30 or 40 degrees and the risk of severe frostbite. Harry didn’t complain; it wasn’t good form – and anyway, everybody else was too busy to listen to him moaning. He would just have to cope.
Navigator Harry Evans prepared for their bombing run, confident in his calculations; they were on schedule and on the right track. But dense cloud obscured the target indicators and any fires on the ground which might have offered them guidance, so his skipper decided to risk circling the target for a few minutes, searching for a gap.
Harry was feeling the pressure. Have I got this wrong? he kept thinking, even though his charts told him he hadn’t. But where the bloody hell was the target? He wondered if the Pathfinders had been wiped out in the bloodbath on the long leg.
They continued to circle the area for 15 minutes, weaving between searchlights and constant bursts of flak, eyes fixed on the sky around them and the swirls of cloud below. They finally spotted a small fire through a break in the cloud and took the decision t
o bomb that. There was no question of returning home with a full load.
The perils of Nuremberg still lay ahead for Ron Butcher and his Canadian crew. As diminishing fuel forced the Tame Boar fighters to land, Ron felt safe enough to descend to the bombing height they were given at the briefing, but the fluctuating winds meant they were approaching the target more quickly than he had anticipated.
Ron stood up to stretch his legs. He had set their course; there was little else he could do until the return flight. As he made his way down the aircraft, he heard the staccato patter of shrapnel. He rushed back to his station. His seat cushion was nowhere to be seen. A gaping hole had been blasted where his backside had been only seconds before. The shredded cushion lay on the floor to one side. Ron picked up what was left of it, replaced it and tried to focus on his charts.
The numbers danced in front of him. His mind was reeling. Had the flak been fired a few seconds earlier, or had he not got out of his seat when he did … It didn’t bear thinking about. ‘Here was the reality of death writ large. The roll of the dice in Bomber Command. A slightly different wind direction, a different choice of movement, a slightly different decision and I’d have been dead. Such were the chances we lived with. I was one of the lucky ones.’
He wasn’t the only one with good reason to give thanks to the gods that night. Fred Stetson, a Lancaster rear gunner, was so superstitious that on each operation he draped his turret with more than a dozen St Christopher medals. They had protected him for 24 ops, and been sorely tested during the tumult of the long leg.
Their fuel tank was holed by flak at the beginning of their run over the target. They managed to drop their bombs, but the pilot couldn’t prevent the plane weaving from side to side. Then a German night fighter swooped into the attack. ‘I tried to swivel my guns. The turret would not work. I could turn it a little to port – not at all to starboard. Luckily the attack was from the port side and I was able to direct a stream of .303s in his general direction. I yelled to the wireless operator for help freeing the turret. The fighter turned away. Was I relieved! But the wireless operator couldn’t get the turret working either. I fumbled on the floor, in case there was an obstruction. Guess what? One of those St Christopher medals I was so fond of had fallen during the weaving and jammed between the moving parts of the turret.’65
In Eschenau, 13-year-old Fritz Fink stood on the mound near his family’s farmhouse and watched the sky above Nuremberg start to glow red. The rumble of aircraft above him was broken only by the howl of the bombs and their ear-splitting eruptions on contact. From their vantage point they had been able to watch the whole raid unfold.
First there had been the Pathfinders. They had dropped their skymarkers ‘on little parachutes like enormous Christmas trees or multi-coloured cascades’. They burned with such intensity that the surrounding area was bathed in an unearthly yellow light.
Fritz realised something had gone seriously wrong. Nuremburg was on fire in the distance, but the markers were also landing near their village. Some had started to fall close to where they stood; the bombs would soon follow.
‘Quick,’ Fritz’s father said. ‘We need to get home.’
The boy felt his stomach turn to water as they stumbled back towards the house. The war had always been close, but never this close. They ran to their cellar. Why were the British bombs falling on the fields and villages and not on the distant city?
He and his family cowered in their dank cellar, usually reserved for storing potatoes, and listened to the bombs falling around them. When they hit the ground long cracks appeared in the cellar wall; windows were blown out above them and tiles shaken from the roof. Death was only metres away.
Had the Allied bombs fallen on Nuremberg they would have razed the city to the ground, but they rained down indiscriminately across the whole region, up to 30 kilometres north of their intended target. They were landing on open countryside, small hamlets, rural villages and towns of little strategic or symbolic importance.
As they completed their bombing run and swung westwards for the path back to England, Ron Butcher was still in shock. But he was shaken out of his stupor when one of his crew pointed out a set of target indicators 30 miles to port. Ron felt his stomach lurch. Was the altimeter correct? Was the speed reading right? What else could be wrong? Had they bombed Nuremberg? Or somewhere else? Schweinfurt? He must have voiced his concerns, because a no-nonsense voice on the intercom told him his efforts would be better spent guiding them home, rather than trying to analyse what had already been and gone.
The headwind was almost gale force. The journey back stretched inexorably ahead of them, and the Luftwaffe would lie in wait, determined to pick off any stragglers. But Ron could only focus on the possibility that he had made an error. He reluctantly concluded that after being blown north of the track they had almost certainly bombed Schweinfurt.
They were not alone. Approximately 100 bombers, many of them manned by inexperienced crews, dropped their loads on the unfortunate town. Fifty miles north-west of Nuremberg, Schweinfurt was home to the German ball-bearing industry, but they had no orders to bomb it. Those that did so were at the mercy of the winds, and thankful for the sudden appearance of a large town beneath thinner cloud cover.
There were no Pathfinder markers, but the first crews assumed they had found the target because of the fires on the ground from other aircraft that had dropped their bombs, or were just a little too eager to get rid of their payload and head for home.
Ray Francis and his crew turned for the run on Nuremberg, and aimed for the optimum height from which to release their bombs. They managed to reach 25,000 feet; ahead of them were three distinct blazes. The question was: which should they choose? The bomb aimer elected to go for the middle one. All other voices fell silent as he coaxed the pilot over his chosen target.
Once their bombs had gone they turned for home, the searchlights and the flak behind them. But the drama was far from over.
‘Are we diving?’ The rear gunner felt the aircraft losing height.
‘I’ve got the instruments in front of me and they don’t show it,’ the pilot replied. There was a brief pause as he checked again. The outside temperature was minus 40 degrees. The instruments weren’t working. ‘Hell, we’ve iced up! Where’s the engineer? Where’s Ray?’
In the tension of the bomb run Ray’s absence had gone unnoticed. He was found lying unconscious and freezing cold on the floor of the fuselage, where he had collapsed earlier after helping the wireless operator. He was so focused on fixing the problem and rescuing his crew-mate that he hadn’t noticed that his own oxygen bottle had run critically low.
They hooked him up to the main supply and he slowly regained consciousness. He had pains in his chest, but was otherwise unharmed. As soon as he was compos mentis he unhooked himself from the supply and went back to work. Rest would have to come later. They were in the middle of an op and his crew needed him.
George Prince, a flight engineer with 50 Squadron, had let himself relax. As they headed south towards the target, the worst, it seemed, was behind them. He could see flak ahead, but he had been through much worse, and the waves of night fighter attacks seemed to have diminished. Or so he thought. They were halfway between Schweinfurt and Frankfurt when there was a loud bang and the aircraft rolled to starboard.
He glanced out of a side window and saw tendrils of flame snaking from the starboard outer engine. They had soon consumed the whole wing, leaving a trail of smoke in its wake. The aircraft started to lose height and tilted into a gentle right-hand turn. George flicked on the Graviner extinguisher, propelling methyl bromide into the engines – one ounce of which could douse 10 ounces of flaming fuel. But the inferno was too far advanced. They were going down; they needed to bale out while they were still able. The pilot gave the order to abandon the aircraft.
George clipped on his parachute. A day before he had been expecting to go back home on leave. Right now he might have been tucked up in bed in New M
alden, after a few pints and a dance with Jocelyn, instead of preparing to jump from a nose-diving bomber over enemy territory.
The bomb aimer battled with the escape hatch, trying to prise it open. George waited impatiently; every second they remained on board brought them closer to impact. He glanced across at the pilot’s seat; it was empty. Had he baled out of the canopy escape hatch above it?
Cold air blasted through the cabin; the front escape hatch was open. The bomb aimer tumbled out and George followed, feet first, cutting his face and scraping his leg as he fell, but that hardly concerned him now. Once free of the aircraft he pulled on the ripcord and muttered a small invocation. The ’chute billowed above him. Oh God, bloody hell! In his panic he thought he saw a tear in the silk …
The rip was an imaginary one; he was floating down normally, or as normally as one could when one had baled out of a burning bomber at 20,000 feet. He made sure to inflate his Mae West lifejacket; he was a non-swimmer and petrified of landing in a river. The darkness swirled around him. He couldn’t even see his plane.
Ron Auckland’s Lancaster was north of the target when he first saw searchlight beams like giant fingers arcing across the sky ahead. The flak started to burst around him, pummelling the aircraft. He felt as if it was rolling over a thousand tiny marbles. The acrid stench of cordite was so overpowering that Ron opened the side window to let in some air.
Almost immediately he was caught in a dazzling blue light. The beam was radar-guided; unless he took drastic action it would stick to them like flypaper; it was only a question of time before the rest of the searchlights and the guns below were trained on them and they would be coned.
