by John Nichol
In Nuremberg itself 75 civilians had been killed, most of them in an apartment building that suffered a direct hit, and a further 100 or so had been injured. The archives record that 256 buildings were destroyed and 11,000 people had been bombed out of their houses, though many were able to return after only a few repairs. When they compared this figure to the thousands killed by each raid on Hamburg in 1943, they may have thought themselves lucky.
Albert Speer’s imposing Nazi monoliths remained mostly intact, and the industrial centre to the south of the city was barely touched. The only factories destroyed in the raid manufactured cables and margarine. There were direct hits on a fire station and one near the telephone exchange; both would have impeded rescue attempts if the raid had been successful, but meant little in isolation. Not a single person was killed in the old city centre, and the historic buildings of Nuremberg had survived.
There was anger and grief amongst its residents, but little damage to their morale. Given the scale of the raid, when the people of Nuremberg emerged from their shelters to assess the damage they knew they had escaped lightly.
In England, it was also time for taking stock.
Their acrimonious debriefing over, Rusty Waughman and his crew headed for the mess. Norman, irrepressible as ever, was looking forward to his eggs and bacon, but few of the others could summon up an appetite. The atmosphere at Ludford Magna felt different that morning; it was as if something had changed, irreparably. Rusty and the boys were accustomed to seeing the friendly, smiling faces of the WAAF girls serving breakfast; it provided much-needed comfort after the ordeal of an op. Today the food counter was laden with fried eggs, fried bread and bacon, but there was no one to dish them out. A notice pinned to the wall asked people to help themselves.
They eventually found the WAAFs crying in the rest room. The squadron had lost seven crews: 56 men whose familiar faces wouldn’t be around any more; men with whom they had joked and flirted. The prospect of empty tables and chairs that morning, and of discovering, as the hours passed, which men were missing and which had returned, was simply too traumatic for them to handle.
Norman offered to go in and console them, but Rusty said they were better left alone. A few minutes later one or two emerged, hollow-eyed, their cheeks wet with tears. Rusty would never forget the pain etched on their faces. Nor would he forget the ‘unsavoury’ atmosphere that hung over the base that day. ‘We walked around in silence, like we were zombies. The after-effects of that op hit me more than any other. The empty bed spaces, the friends who had gone; it affected everybody on the station, and not only the aircrew. We all had this sense it was a disaster.’
The strain was perhaps felt most heavily by the senior officers on the base, the station commander Group Captain King and Wing Commander Alexander. To them fell the grave task of notifying the relatives of their missing husbands and sons. Rusty was to get to know Bob Alexander well. ‘He told me about the incredible burden of having to write hundreds of letters to the relatives of those who’d died.’
Back in their hut after breakfast, Rusty opened his diary and started to write.
‘Ops NURENBURG [sic] Wholesale slaughter – must have seen at least 16 a/c shot down … Navigation was bang on!! Nearly all sightings on the way in south of the Ruhr & home much quieter!! (Moon well up – almost daylight) … We lost 7, quite a blow. All pretty tired and shaken! Never the less we must “press on” regardless.’
Sam Harris finally climbed into his bed at Elsham Wolds at 9.00 a.m., but he didn’t feel much like sleeping. He lay there for a while, smoking a cigarette. The hut wasn’t any warmer than it had been the previous morning. The icicles still hung from the roof, though the heat from the stove would soon melt them, he hoped. But all that mattered was that he was alive. He wondered how many others would not be returning to their beds that morning. For him, after some shut-eye, it would be another day in Bomber Command.
Harry Evans was so troubled by his experiences over Nuremberg that he did something he had never done before and would never do again. He realised that news of the raid and its losses would start to trickle out as the day wore on, when it was released to the press and radio, and the public would learn that Bomber Command had suffered a serious setback. Telegram couriers would soon be delivering their heartbreaking news to unsuspecting families across the land, and he was concerned that his parents might worry. More than 65 years later his eyes brim with tears as, sitting in the comfort of his spacious home, he recalls making that phone call. ‘I rang them to say, “I’m still about.” That was the only time that I ever rang them to tell them I’d made it home from an op.’
After the debrief and breakfast, Ron Butcher and his crew went back to dispersal to check the damage to their aircraft. The ground crew was hard at work fixing her up. They had been hit five times by flak, twice through the left bomb bay door and three times in the fuselage next to the bomb bay. Two pieces of flak had travelled back with them: one large one embedded in the wireless set, and another smaller splinter near the navigation desk. The other shrapnel had probably fallen from the bay when the doors were opened and the bombs released. They had been extraordinarily lucky. The hits to the door had been inches from detonating thousands of pounds of explosives and killing them all.
Their good fortune was felt more profoundly when Ron learned that his roommate and friend, Gord Schacter, was among the missing. In some respects, it was no surprise; Ron had flown with that crew when Gord was unwell and he knew how uncoordinated they were. But it did not ease the shock. He was asked to help the Service Police identify and catalogue Gord’s belongings, bag them up, and then prepare a casualty telegram for the adjutant. It was a sobering task, especially as Ron reflected on the fact that Gord could have been doing the same for him if the cards had fallen in a different order.
Gord was not the only friend that Ron lost that night. Bill Dixon, another navigator with 578 Squadron, born in a village very near Ron’s family home, was also killed. ‘Every crew became hardened to seeing others go down,’ he said, ‘and felt that surge of guilty gratitude that it was someone else’s turn.’ Nonetheless he was gravely affected by the loss of two close friends.
Others were even less able to shrug off the constant spectre of death. Another roommate of Ron’s, Captain Charlie Duke, was a Canadian dentist who had arrived on base only a few days before Nuremberg, and was so traumatised by the extent of the losses that he requested an immediate move away from the base to a training station. He left that day and they never saw him again.
Alan Payne landed back at East Kirkby to be met with the disbelief others had reported when he described the legions of losses he had witnessed. After a sleep, he went into Boston and sank a few beers before heading for the Regal cinema with his girlfriend Pat to see DuBarry Was a Lady, an escapist musical about a washroom attendant who strikes it rich. It was a chance to take his mind off the events of the last 24 hours. ‘Pat and I didn’t discuss the op in any great detail; she asked how we’d got on but I brushed it aside. My time with her was when I tried to forget the reality of the war: I just wanted to enjoy the moment.’
He doesn’t remember being more shaken on this occasion than he had been previously. ‘We knew it was a heavy chop rate that night, but a few days before there’d been a heavy chop rate on a Berlin raid, with about 70 or 80 aircraft going down.’
The pain from Dick Starkey’s fractured ankle grew worse with each passing minute. Were his captors simply going to leave him here in this small office to die? Finally, that afternoon, he heard a motorcycle pull up outside. The local doctor had arrived. Dick almost wept with gratitude.
The doctor walked in and stared at him. There was no compassion or concern in his expression, only anger. Dick tried to smile, but the doctor began to yell words he couldn’t understand. What was wrong? He grabbed hold of Dick’s legs and started to shake them. The agony from his shattered ankle coursed through him like wildfire and he was unable to stop himself screaming. He started
to gasp for air. Once the pain lessened enough for him to be able to open his eyes again, he looked around the room. The veteran designated to guard him was still there, his face taut with concern. The doctor had gone.
He resolved not to put his trust in the local medical profession but in the enemy soldiers, who would at least escort him to a camp or a military hospital where he might receive some treatment.
His next visitor was a boy who looked no older than 10. In broken English he told Dick, ‘Me … English … tutor …’
Dick, his mind fogged by pain, thought the child was telling him he was an English tutor, which seemed highly improbable. Then he understood: the boy was telling him he had an English tutor. Thank Heavens, he thought, and asked the boy to bring him over as fast as he could. Half an hour later an elderly man arrived and explained in English who he was.
‘I saw your plane crash,’ he said.
Dick was amazed.
‘I saw it explode,’ he continued. ‘It was a terrible sight.’
The old man would not stop talking about what he had seen. It had clearly affected him, but Dick was becoming increasingly impatient, more concerned about the present than the past. ‘I am in terrible pain,’ he gasped. ‘Can you ask the police officer if I can be taken to the hospital?’
‘You will be taken later in the day,’ the old man replied.
News of the night’s losses started to spread. Ron Butcher and his crew were eating in the mess to the sound of Alvar Lidell’s radio news bulletin. The grim announcements Lidell often found himself having to make in his ‘stentorian but nicely modulated’ tones had earned him the nickname The Voice of Doom. He certainly lived up to it that day.
‘Last night our bombers attacked Nuremberg. Ninety-six of our aircraft failed to return …’
The silence that followed seemed endless. There wasn’t even the scrape of a knife or fork on a plate. No one spoke. Lidell’s words seem to hang in the rafters before they settled on those present. Ron knew the losses would be heavy, but no one suspected they would be that high. It had been Bomber Command’s worst night of the war. ‘I’d never heard the mess so deathly quiet. It seemed as if everyone had died or gone elsewhere.’
When the conversation started once more, its tone was bleak; everyone agreed that unless the choice of targets and the tactics of Bomber Command were altered, then the chances of them surviving their tours were non-existent.
After the meal they made their way back to their quarters. Just as they had on that cold February night a few weeks before, Ron and his crew spoke of their fears and doubts about whether they would see their homes, friends and families again. It appeared inconceivable that they would survive if asked to go on more raids like Nuremberg. Death had never seemed more imminent or inevitable.
Ron Auckland’s wife, Sheila, was in their kitchen preparing lunch when she heard the news. Sheila froze, and was then overcome by a wave of nausea. She couldn’t believe it. Ninety-six aircraft? That was more than 500 men … Ron might be among them … Her hands started to tremble. Her sister asked what was wrong. She told her about the radio broadcast. ‘I really think I’ve lost Ron,’ she whispered.
Her sister tried to reassure her. ‘You don’t even know if he was on that raid …’
Sheila would not calm down, so her sister tried a different tack. ‘Let’s just stop what we’re doing and go shopping to take your mind off it.’
They went into Portsmouth. People brushed past them, going about their daily business, but to Sheila they were as distant as ghosts. As they trudged from shop to shop, Sheila could not shake the belief – ‘in my heart’ – that Ron was dead. ‘Something seemed to click. I just felt certain he was gone.’ They returned home later that afternoon, with Sheila wondering how she was going to cope as a widow. She turned the key in the door and walked into the house, aiming for a quiet corner to sit and cry.
There, standing at the bottom of the stairs, was Ron.
‘Hello, love,’ he said.
He had been so desperate to get home and see his wife that he had only slept for an hour and then hitched a ride on an Oxford aircraft – which the RAF used to ferry crews between bases – taking a group to Tangmere, near Chichester. From there it was a short train ride to Portsmouth.
Sheila flung herself into his arms.
The aftershock from the operation rippled through every base across the land. Messes fell quiet; in their quarters and billets airmen spoke in hushed whispers; in parlours and kitchens civilians offered up prayers for brave men lost, and for the protection of those still serving.
The shock was even greater for those airmen who had made it through the raid unscathed, like Tony Hiscock, a Pathfinder pilot who had been at the front of the stream, oblivious to the slaughter. Their only problem had been landing in their fog-bound base at Upwood. They were re-routed to RAF Marham, where they had a hearty breakfast while waiting for the sky to clear, and it was only as they climbed back on board their Lancaster and the wireless operator switched on the radio that they heard the appalling news. ‘Good grief; that was a real shock for all of us. The number stood out so much. We wondered how it had happened, because we hadn’t noticed anything at all unusual. We were utterly astounded that so many aircraft had gone down.’
Thomas Maxwell had baled out of his rear turret in dramatic fashion during the Stuttgart raid on 15 March. In the fortnight since, he had managed to avoid being captured, even though he had landed only 500 metres away from a German army base. Now he was working his way through France towards the Pyrenees, hiding by day and travelling only at night, relying on the Resistance and the friendliness of the locals to keep him out of the hands of the enemy.
The day after the Nuremberg raid he was concealed in the loft space of a French farmhouse. It was so cold he could barely feel his fingers, but he still managed to turn the dials on an old wireless he had been given so he could listen to news from home. Through the crackle and hiss, he heard about the losses via the BBC World Service. His first response was relief; yes, he had been shot down, and he was shivering in the roof of a house in the middle of France, but there were reasons to be cheerful: he was still alive, and he had not been in the battle order for the night of 30 March.
Then he contemplated the mood back in the UK, the gloom that must have settled on Bomber Command bases across the country. He thought of the families of the missing colleagues who, like his, would be wild with worry about their loved ones. At least his family wouldn’t be getting a telegram telling them he was dead. Not yet at least. It made his determination to get back safely to England all the greater.
Later that afternoon Dick Starkey was loaded on to another horse-drawn cart. He had been brought to the mayor’s office in the dark, so this was his first chance to take a look at his surroundings. The village was built on top of a steep hill. In the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, he could see plumes of black smoke curling up from a densely planted wood. They had to be coming from the smouldering wreckage of his Lancaster.
The cart moved slowly, its wheels crunching on the rough, dirt road. Dick was cold and in great pain but he still managed to savour the scenery. His brush with death had changed his perspective. As they made their way between tree-fringed hills and past undulating fields, he realised he was seeing the world anew.
After about three miles the cart descended into a valley, where it continued its slow journey. Eventually he started to see houses. They were nearing Wetzlar, a city in the state of Hesse, an industrial stronghold that had been heavily bombed. The historic old town had survived, and it was here that Dick was brought to a makeshift hospital used to treat German soldiers wounded on the Russian Front.
Dick was stretchered in and given his own room. The veteran who had guarded him all day wished him luck and Dick offered his thanks – two combatants, on opposing sides, each wounded while fighting for their country, who bore each other no ill will. Inside the hospital Dick was lifted off his stretcher and laid on a bed. Three doc
tors arrived and examined his injuries. They told him he needed an operation. Dick nodded his understanding. Then one of the doctors hesitated, as if he was about to ask a question. Finally he asked: ‘What sort of man is Winston Churchill?’
Dick was not sure what to say. This was the fifth year of the war. Surely they would know all about him by now? Perhaps they believed the war might end soon, that they would be on the losing side and were looking for a sign that Churchill would not seek to punish the German people. He mumbled a reply, hoping it did not sound too inadequate. Their friendly, inquisitive demeanour could not have contrasted more dramatically with that of the hate-filled medic who had ranted and raved and twisted his splintered ankle.
When he came around from the operation, a small piece of metal had been removed from his right foot, which had been set and plastered. His left leg and foot had also been bandaged. His neck had been X-rayed; it was badly jarred but not broken. Then he was put on a ward with a group of German soldiers no older than he was.
They brought him books, or simply came to gawp at him. Lying there in their pyjamas, they could all have been on the same side. They were certainly no strangers to the conflict and its horrors. ‘These young soldiers were from the Eastern Front, and they must have seen terrible battles between Russian and German forces. Most of them would have made up their minds that Germany had already lost the war, because they were taking severe punishment on the Russian Front. Many of them would be sent back there once their wounds had healed.’
Len Lambert, who had baled out of Cy Barton’s Halifax, lay hidden all day in the woods. In the valley below he could see a village studded with timber houses, surrounded by fields and farmland. He pored over his map, desperately trying to work out where he might be, but without a more obvious landmark it was impossible. He grew colder and colder, until dusk fell. Then he emerged from his refuge and decided to head south.
