by John Nichol
Len Lambert’s landing, after he baled from Cy Barton’s damaged Halifax, was softer than Dick Starkey’s, even though he hit the ground at a ‘terrific’ rate. He was winded, but no more than that. He took off his parachute and Mae West and buried them beneath a bush.
Len tried to work out what his next move should be. He needed to get rid of any clothing that might identify him as an RAF airman. Off went his heated flying suit, then he used his penknife to slice off the tops of his flying boots so they would look more like normal shoes. He would be much colder, but less recognisable.
His best option, he decided, was to head for the Swiss border. He set off, armed only with a silk handkerchief escape map, sorely lacking in detail, and a miniature compass from his survival kit, which also contained chocolate, Horlicks tablets, a tube of condensed milk, a rubber water bag and water purifying tablets.
Initially he made good progress. He found a main road to follow. When a motorbike passed he ducked for cover behind a hedge. The distant bark of a dog and the faint chimes of a church clock indicated life nearby. He reached the outskirts of a small village and decided to skirt around it.
He soon found himself in thick woods, split by streams and difficult to pass. Finally he came across a rough track that led him though more woodland. As he forced his way through high grass and thickets which tugged at his clothing, then staggered up a steep hill, the Swiss border seemed impossibly far away.
At the first watery signs of dawn, he knew he needed to hide and rest.
Roger Coverley had jumped from his flaming Halifax and floated serenely down to the earth – until he collided with a tree-top. Thick branches scratched his face and bruised and battered his body as he tumbled through them. Then he came to a sudden stop, and was left dangling in the darkness. He couldn’t see how far he was from the ground. What should he do? He could be 20 or 30 feet up; far enough to do himself some serious damage. But he could hardly just hang there until the Germans found him. He took a deep breath, reached for the release harness and braced himself for the fall.
He fell 10 inches on to German soil.
Roger looked up. The parachute was spread out above him, a beacon in the darkness ‘like a bloody great umbrella giving a big signal where I was’. He needed to get as far away from it as he could, and as quickly as possible. He was no longer Roger Coverley, veteran pilot, carving his way through the air towards prime German targets; he had no crew, and he had no plane. He was on his own, deep in enemy territory, and it was his duty to try and find his way back to safety.
Every crew had been sent on escape and evasion courses as part of their training, but not everyone paid close attention. Some airmen didn’t want to contemplate worst-case scenarios, in the same way that some didn’t want to know their identity tag was made of asbestos so it wouldn’t perish if they burned to death. Roger was one of the ones who had listened, and he was determined to put his training to good use.
They had been instructed to travel at night and hide by day, so he knew he had to start walking immediately. He found his way to a railway track and followed it to the mouth of a tunnel. Depending on its length, its cover would allow him to make valuable progress by day. Before stepping inside, he looked back. Strips of silver Window decorated the trees like tinsel, and the earth around them was littered with Allied propaganda leaflets. I won’t have a problem finding something to read, he thought to himself.
As those on the ground adjusted to life on the run, in the skies above them, from Stuttgart to Strasbourg, on to Metz and north of Paris, the surviving bombers crawled back towards the Channel. The weather had worsened; the clear skies had given way to sleet and rainstorms. Australian Pilot Officer J.A. Forrest was keeping his Lancaster steady at 4,000 feet when the adverse conditions forced him to shift his track eastwards and climb to avoid the turbulence. A bolt of lightning hit the nose of the aircraft and danced along the fuselage.
Momentarily blinded, Forrest was unable to see his instruments. In a sudden fit of panic he believed his aircraft was mortally damaged and going down. He bellowed over the intercom for his crew to bale out. The mid-upper gunner and wireless operator were unaffected by the lightning strike and complied immediately. The rest of them were too stunned to respond and remained at their posts. Forrest regained his vision in time to bring the diving plane level. He checked their altitude and the state of their engines: they were fine. They would be able to make an emergency landing in England.
Only then did Forrest realise that, in the confusion following the lightning strike, they had been flying over the Channel. His two crew-mates must have landed in the water; given its temperature, they would have had no chance of survival. Both men were never found.70
Sam Harris and his crew had managed to edge their way to the French coast without incident, and at 4.12 a.m. they were over English soil. They skirted the anti-aircraft guns that ringed London, in case any of their crews were feeling trigger-happy. Three minutes later they started the slow descent to their base at Elsham Wolds. In the distance they saw the beacon which flashed their airfield’s code signal to the returning aircraft.
At 5.05 a.m., an hour ahead of schedule, Ken asked for permission to land. There was no sign of life in the darkness below them. Nothing stirred. There was a brief delay as they circled the airfield; he had to convince the startled air control officer that this was one of their planes returning. The flurry of familiar voices failed to dispel the tension; it was not uncommon for opportunistic German night fighters to shoot down bombers as they flew in to land.
The runway lights were switched on, the paraffin flares ignited.
Ken started his approach. ‘Undercarriage down …’
‘Undercarriage selected down. Two red lights. Lights out,’ Mac replied. ‘Undercarriage down and locked down.’
The tyres squealed as they kissed the tarmac. There was a bump and a bounce and a roar of brakes as the bomber staggered to a halt. They were back; exhausted, but still alive.
As they climbed unsteadily from G-George, their delighted ground crew were there to greet them. Ken asked if anyone else had returned.
‘No, you’re the first ones back,’ they were told.
Sam didn’t know what to think. Where were the others?
They lit cigarettes, hands cupped around the flame to protect it from the wind, inhaling the sweet smoke in the misty pre-dawn light. Ken gave his thanks to the ground crew. It had been a terrible raid; the old plane had been the only reliable part of it. She had seen them through yet another mission, their toughest yet, and brought them safely home.
Across eastern England weary crews and wounded aircraft prepared for their descent. Squadron Leader ‘Turkey’ Laird of 427 Squadron was warned by his navigator that they were off course and asked for a turn to port. The alteration was a minor one, but enough to bring them into the path of another Lancaster.
‘What the hell!’ Laird’s cry echoed in rear gunner John Moffat’s intercom, but it was too late. The other incoming aircraft struck the top of theirs with a world-shaking crash. Everyone apart from John was killed instantly. He was able to parachute to safety because he was facing away from the impact and had been protected by his turret. ‘I saw the Lancaster off to my left; he just seemed to nose down. There was no fire.’
The navigators of both aircraft were from the same town in Canada, Saskatoon. After everything that had been thrown at them in the last few hours, there can have been few men more unfortunate than these. Collisions took place in crowded skies, during take-off and landing, or during a bombing run. Rarely did they happen in open skies.
But this was the night when everything had conspired against the men of the Bomber Command.
Dick Starkey came to once more; the moon was lower, a fading orb on the horizon. He lay there wondering what to do next. He couldn’t walk, and couldn’t bear to just lie and wait until he was found.
Racked with pain, with little idea of his precise location, his mind churned with a host of con
flicting emotions. Only a few hours before he had been laughing and joking with his friends on base; now many of them were heading home from Nuremberg whilst he was marooned behind enemy lines, unable to move and in real danger of freezing to death. ‘I was in shock. I was in enemy territory and I was scared and unsure of what was going to happen. I didn’t know if I was going to survive or not. This made me sad and frightened. But I was also relieved that my war in the skies was now over.’
He heard German voices on the wind and, given the state of his leg, he resigned himself to capture. As they drew nearer, he saw the sweep and flicker of torchlight. He cried out; the beam swung in his direction. A group of men converged on him and the light was shone directly in his face.
One of the younger Germans started to shout and pulled back his rifle butt, as if poised to smash Dick in the head, but he was stopped by one of the older ones. They wrapped the injured airman in his parachute, lifted him on to a stretcher and carried him to a horse-drawn cart.
The cart was driven with agonising slowness along a dirt track. Every protrusion and pothole reverberated along his broken leg. Above him the skies had fallen silent; the bombers would be almost home, a place that seemed impossibly distant now. He was increasingly haunted by the lesson of his escape and evasion course: more important than the skills they might use to avoid capture was their conduct if they were captured. The message was drummed into them: don’t let the side down and blurt out everything you know. Instead, give only name, rank and number; nothing else.
They finally pulled up outside a small brick building – the office of the Bürgermeister, the local mayor. Dick was carried up the stone steps and his stretcher was laid none too carefully on the floor.
A policeman asked for a volunteer to keep watch on their prisoner. The man chosen was a veteran who had been invalided out of the German army after losing an arm on the Eastern Front.
Those early-morning hours were as long as any Dick had lived through. The pain from his neck, back and smashed, misshapen ankle was relentless. He hoped a doctor might come with medication to help ease his misery, but the only visitors were a stream of curious and excited locals, sometimes whole families with children, who had come to see the exotic enemy flier who had dropped so suddenly from the skies.
The women clucked their tongues and gave him sympathetic glances as he lay wincing on the floor. Dick wondered what was going through their minds. ‘It’s almost as though you’re an alien, or in a zoo or something like that. They came from miles around to have a look at this guy who’d landed in their midst. They’d been told all their propaganda: we were Terror Flieger, terror fliers, who were getting paid bonuses to kill them; and here was the reality: me – a frightened young lad.’
One man came in brandishing a bloody flying boot, inscribed with the name of one of Dick’s crew. He tried to ask if they had found the man to whom it belonged. Eventually he made himself understood.
‘Kaput,’ came the reply.
In his discomfort, he had only been able to worry about himself. Now he wondered how many of the others had made it out alive. And perhaps the most agonising thought of all: we were all meant to miss this op and were only put on the battle order because we insisted on it.
CHAPTER 14
A Terrible Dawn
Harry Evans
After watching his crews depart, Eric Howell had slept fitfully in the back of the dispersal hut. 31 March 1944 was his 23rd birthday, but all he asked for was the safe arrival of the 15 aircraft that had left Dunholme Lodge the night before.
At 5.30 a.m. he was woken by the duty NCO; the returning bombers were flying a circuit above the airfield. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and waited for the call confirming that his new Lancaster, C-Charlie, flown by Pilot Officer Charlesworth, was on its way in.
For the ground crews the vigil was over. When the phone rang in their hut to let them know their aircraft was on its way in, they grabbed their torches and headed out into the dawn gloom. Red, green and white navigation lights did battle with flashes of torchlight, and the air was filled with the roar of idling engines as the bombers taxied to a halt. Once the chocks had been put in place and the weary crews had disembarked, there was a chance to ask them if there had been any snags. That morning they knew it had been a bad one; the fatigue was etched on their faces.
In his hut Eric Howell watched an hour crawl by. There was still no news of C-Charlie. Eric went outside, hoping to see a dot in the grey sky and the blink of navigation lights, or to hear the sound of distant engines. One by one, 10 other Lancasters landed, taxied on to the hard standing and shut down their engines. The silence that followed seemed like a reproach.
He knew then that his aircraft was not coming home; neither were four others from the squadron. Eric was beside himself. ‘My stomach was knotted. It wasn’t just the loss of a single aircraft; it was the loss of so many of them! When a ground crew lost an aircraft, a little niggle of conscience invaded the mind and made you all the more determined to do a better job of servicing.’71
Eric trudged disconsolately across to the mess with the other ground crew whose planes were missing. C-Charlie was the fourth of his bombers to go down in the past three months; he knew the guilt and sadness would burden him for months to come.
Sam Harris and his crew had been amongst the first to return. They climbed aboard the truck which would take them to the debriefing room. This was normally a time of relief and laughter, a time to enjoy a coffee laced with rum as other crews arrived and the intelligence officers and flight commanders made a note of all that they had seen and done; a time to swap stories and jokes and pats on the back.
That morning was different. There was no light relief. Few of them spoke; each dwelt on his own thoughts; each tried to absorb and process what they had experienced that night. Ken, Sam’s pilot, leaned back in his seat and lit a cigarette. The Station Commander asked if he had seen many losses. Ken tilted his head back and exhaled. The smoke hung over them like a pall. It was a few seconds before he spoke.
‘I think there were tremendous losses tonight.’
Sam raised an eyebrow. To maintain their morale whilst they were still in the air Ken had blamed the carnage on ‘Scarecrows’, the mythical shells the Germans fired that were rumoured to mimic the appearance of exploding aircraft. But here on the ground he was not going to varnish the truth.
As their Lancaster stuttered across Europe, Andy Wiseman clutched the lucky doll given to him by his girlfriend Jean. They managed to clear enemy territory without incident, but as they crossed the Channel the bomber started to falter. His pilot knew they wouldn’t be able to make it back to Leconfield. They needed somewhere else to land, and quickly.
The wireless operator broadcast their distress, and a searchlight beam appeared to indicate the path to their nearest airfield, a US base in the south of England. ‘That beam was a lovely sight. It was almost like a saviour – there’s somebody down there who knows we’re up here and in trouble.’
As they came down through the thick cloud, Andy could see the distant flicker of the paraffin lamps marking the runway. It was not home, but it was a very welcome sight.
Their pilot brought them in slowly and steadily. As they neared the ground, Andy could see fire engines and ambulances gathering beside the runway. He braced himself. There was a small bump as they touched down, but that was all. The landing was perfect. Andy uncurled his fingers from around the doll. They had needed every ounce of her help that night.
The emergency vehicles swarmed around them as they came to a halt. Even though none of them was injured, they were helped off the aircraft and taken to the mess for a much-needed beer and breakfast. But the hospitality ended there. Looking like zombies, still in their helmets and flying suits and clutching their parachutes, they were issued with railway vouchers for the journey back to their base – third class.
On board B-Beer, heading for 622 Squadron in Mildenhall, Ray Francis had every excuse to rest after passing ou
t earlier. But the aircraft had developed a fault in the pneumatic line that served the brakes, and only he was capable of fixing it; without his expertise they would have had to head for the emergency airfield at Woodbridge.
Only 40 miles from Mildenhall, Woodbridge boasted specialist rescue and medical teams and a three-mile runway to give damaged aircraft room to stop, but it was known as ‘the graveyard of many bombers who had crash-landed there’ – and every man on board was desperate to sleep in his own bed after the debrief.
Ray made his way woozily back up front. He had lost his pliers when they were corkscrewing to escape the swarms of night fighters, but he was determined to do what he could. The ruptured line was under the pilot’s seat. As Ray crouched beneath his skipper, his pullover started to feel warmer than usual – then damp and cold. He looked up, wondering what the hell was happening, but only for a moment. This has not been my night, he thought. The pilot had decided to relieve himself into a contraption they called the Pissophone, and the bottom end of the hose had come loose.
Rusty Waughman and his crew, lightened of their bomb load, made good progress back to the UK. The night fighters were still patrolling the sky, but Ted could tell from the German controllers’ broadcasts that the frequency of their attacks was diminishing.
As they approached the English coast, Rusty fired up the VHF radio to let their ack-ack batteries know they were coming in. Despite their relief, no one felt like giving voice to their usual homecoming rendition of ‘Coming Home on a Wing and a Prayer’. The op had been too traumatic to allow the luxury of celebration.
Despite Rusty’s broadcast, they were misidentified as they flew closer to London and flak shells started to erupt around their aircraft. They were plunged back into the kind of nightmare they had somehow survived four hours earlier. But no damage was done and they started their descent towards Ludford Magna.
