Fly

by Michael Veitch

  Bob began operations way before the development of electronic aids that would later be able to pinpoint a target in a city thousands of blacked-out miles away. All he and his crew had to rely on was good intelligence, a thorough briefing and a compass. ‘And they weren’t much good,’ he says.

  It was a time when losses from German fighters were heavy. I ask him if he encountered them. ‘Oh … yes,’ he says vaguely then goes into another tantalising pause. ‘They were very good, the German pilots. Much better than the Italians,’ he says, still flicking through the pages of the book. ‘What did you do when you met one?’ I ask. Another pause. ‘Well, we’d turn towards them,’ he says, not looking up. This perplexes me completely. I decide to just wait. At last he resumes. ‘We’d turn towards them, and then go underneath them. Oh, yes, we lost a few.’ I’ll bet they did.

  I prompt Bob by asking him the basics, such as how often he flew after becoming operational. He leans forward and places his old logbook on his lap, turning the pages with the same hand that more than sixty years previously filled it so meticulously with entries in ink: targets, bomb loads and flight durations. There is another long pause, then he notices something and reads aloud. ‘Oh yes – “badly shot up by a night fighter” – lucky to get back to England that time.’ More silence. It’s all becoming a kind of torture. I’m beginning to fear I’ll barely have anything to write about. Perhaps he’s getting back at me for my lack of punctuality after all.

  ‘What, er, happened on this occasion, Bob?’ I ask tentatively.

  It was 26 April 1942. He tells me it was another ‘Intruder’ trip: duck over to Eindhoven at night, drop a few bombs and cause as much mayhem as possible then get back home fast. ‘Yes, we caught up with a German,’ Bob says. ‘Or rather, he caught up with us.’

  At this point, Bob pauses again, but this time I can tell something has occurred to him. ‘Actually,’ he says, and without completing the sentence, gets up and goes to the bookshelf.

  ‘I don’t think we were supposed to do it,’ he says, rummaging for something in the stacks. He pulls down an old, thin volume and, still standing, opens it. ‘I used to write it all up.’

  ‘Write it all up?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Write it all up. After the trips.’ He hands me the volume. It is an old exercise book, red-covered and with an old-fashioned gummed label on the front reading ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ and ‘Robert Molesworth’ in ink. ‘No, we definitely weren’t supposed to do it.’

  Inside, every page is covered in Bob’s tidy, old-fashioned handwriting. Blinking, I realise it is his own, personal diary of every operational trip he ever flew. ‘My goodness,’ is all I can say. I open the first page. The handwriting is clear and legible and I begin to read:

  8.3.42 HIGH LEVEL ATTACK ON DOCKS AT OSTEND.

  A/C BLENHEIM IV V.5645 R for ROBERT. BASE – ALDEBURGH – OSTEND – SOUTHWOLD – BASE. 4x250lb G.P. BOMBS.

  This was our first operational trip so of course we were somewhat nervous and excited. The aerodrome was in a frightful state with melting snow and wind, however we were rather lucky to get off as eighteen a/c were taking off that night, and as we discovered later, several of them got bogged and were unable to go …

  I turn from page to page. It is like the opening of a floodgate. Reading, I can at last hear Bob’s voice loud and clear. Each trip is here vividly described, written only hours after it had been completed and with the excitement and freshness of youth leaping off the page. A little like the diaries kept by Harvey Bawden, but in much longer form. Almost an essay has been written for each operation. I flip through it. Keeping such a journal during wartime was a security risk and a strict no-no in the RAF. Had it been discovered he would have been in some trouble and definitely lost it. If I had been looking for gold, here it was in my hands.

  I ask Bob whether he had ever shown it to anyone, or given it to the newspapers. ‘I don’t think so. No,’ he says, as I turn the pages carefully.

  Bob’s journal could be the subject of a book on its own and it is beyond the scope of this one to reproduce it fully. For the next few hours I take in the story of his tour as he tells it, complementing it with what he wrote just hours after he landed. The journal fills in what Bob, by way of memory or modesty, omits. It’s an extraordinary, time-shrinking journey.

  But back to the night they met the German night fighter. I read that even before they encountered it, they were already defenceless:

  After crossing the English coast at 2000 feet Billy Burberry on testing his guns discovered that they were unserviceable. I asked him to try to fix them. Bill told me the ‘fire’ and ‘safe’ units were missing so it was impossible … I decided to carry on to the target and told Bill to keep a special look out as it was a bright moonlit night.

  ‘Those nights were rare,’ says Bob, ‘but we were grateful for it later.’ They found the target, bombed without incident and headed home.

  About thirty miles from the coast, Bill asked me if he could reel out the aerial and get a wireless fix. Thinking we were out of night fighter range, I told him to do so. Just as I heard the aerial reeling out, a stream of tracer seemed to blind me, there was a sickening explosion and the old kite was completely filled with black smoke and the smell of cordite … I realised we were up against a night fighter and had been badly hit … I then saw it climb over the top of us having given us another burst. Two bullets whipped past my head like wasps, and made two neat holes in the perspex in front of my face.

  It was, says Bob, a very fast, very deadly Junkers 88, but he knew it would only follow them thirty or so miles out to sea. ‘I dived and flew back at about twenty feet above the sea, keeping it between ourselves and the moon until it lost us,’ he says. Limping back towards England, Bob had no desire to come down in the Channel. ‘You couldn’t ditch a Blenheim,’ he says. ‘It would go straight down like a stone.’

  Bob now took stock of the damage. I read aloud some of his own words describing the scene:

  A bullet had hit Bill’s hand and a shell had exploded right beside his shoulder. The floor of the aircraft had been torn away by cannon fire, Bill’s parachute having fallen out into the sea. The wireless had been hit, the instrument panel was shot away, the hydraulic system destroyed and the electric circuit ceased to function, so we had no lights whatever as we approached the English coast.

  At this Bob chuckles a little. ‘Sounds like we were in trouble, doesn’t it?’ They gained height, and made landfall over East Anglia.

  ‘We crossed the coast at 700 feet, which was a great relief,’ he says, ‘but then I noticed the starboard engine losing power. I tried all sorts of things to keep it going but then it just stopped.’ As he tells me this, I look down to the journal.

  Immediately I tried to trim the aircraft to fly on one engine but discovered the rudder trimming gear to be completely jammed from a shell-burst … I told Tim we were losing height and would have to land just where we were.

  ‘We let a flare off at about 250 feet and that’s when we were grateful for the bright night because we spotted an airstrip still under construction in the moonlight,’ says Bob. ‘I turned and went in. The wheels wouldn’t come down so we made a belly landing.’

  … we came in downwind without flaps and must have touched down at about 120 mph. We bumped and crashed along the ground until we came to a sudden stop … then there was a flash of flame and we knew we were in for more trouble.

  ‘Actually,’ he tells me, ‘the sudden stop was us hitting a bulldozer they were using to make the airfield. We slammed straight into it. That’s when the engine caught fire.’

  I shouted to Tim to get out quickly but he needed no encouragement. I climbed out onto the starboard wing and shouted to Bill that we were on fire and not to waste any time. A muffled voice from inside told us he could not move the hatch. However Tim pushed it from the outside and to my relief, out came Bill’s head. We then shook hands on our amazing escape and climbed into a large ditch where we lay for abou
t twenty minutes while the petrol tanks, oxygen bottles and ammunition exploded in a sheet of flame …

  I am now full of questions for Bob that I try to get into some kind of order while he gets up and heads for the bathroom, negotiating the prone mass of dog with surprising agility.

  I sit there alone for a while in the strange but impressive room, trying to read as much of the journal as possible before his return. The dog snores at my feet.

  ‘You must have been shaken up by this?’ I suggest later. Bob answers, again vaguely. ‘Oh, I dunno whether I was really.’ It’s no boast, just a simple statement.

  It was 1.30 in the morning when they crash-landed near, they later discovered, the little Norfolk village of Dickleburgh. The crew was taken to a farmhouse, given a meal and later that morning picked up and flown back to base. On the way they circled the wreck of their aircraft, ‘Q for Queenie’. ‘All that was left were two wingtips and the tail,’ Bob tells me.

  A few weeks later, one of the true turning points in the direction of the European air war took place, the so-called ‘Thousand Plan’, the first 1000-aircraft raid on Germany.

  New Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris had enjoyed recent success in a series of attacks along the Baltic coast, virtually wiping out the old Hanseatic League towns of Lubeck and Rotock in the first flexings of his indiscriminate ‘area bombing’ policy.

  Harris now pressed Churchill for an all-out attack, pulling together everything he could get into the air for a one-night show against a big city. Always conscious of the power of a strong headline, Harris pressed for the magic total of 1000 aircraft to be made available. Crews and machines were brought in from everywhere: Coastal Command, Fighter Command and even Training Command, who supplied forty-nine aircraft flown by student pilots.

  Nothing like it had ever been seen before. For the first time, aircraft were coordinated to fly at particular heights and intervals to avoid the possibility of collision, and hopefully, overwhelm the defences and fire services. Cologne was chosen for the attack, and big parts of Germany’s third-largest city were destroyed.

  Some 1047 aircraft of various types took part in the first ‘Thousand Plan’. Among the 12 840 buildings destroyed or damaged, 486 people killed and thousands more injured or made homeless, only one military installation is mentioned as being hit, a solitary flak barracks.

  Churchill had stated he was prepared to lose a hundred aircraft in the attack, but in fact only sacrificed forty-one. The ‘Thousand Plan’ was considered a great success and set the pattern for the next three years.

  Bob was in the air that night too, with the squadron, keeping the German night fighters busy with raids on their aerodrome at Bonn. ‘The searchlights were the brightest I had seen, and very accurate. They sort of just passed us on from one to the other,’ he says. ‘It was so bright I had put my head on the instrument panel to avoid the glare, and escaped to the south.’ Despite this, he managed to find the target, laying a stick of bombs across the aerodrome. In the journal, he writes of looking to the north and witnessing:

  an amazing sight. The ‘heavies’ were arriving over Cologne at a rate of 12 a minute. There were the most terrific flashes from the ground as the four and eight thousand-pounders burst with terrific flashes. A cone of searchlights completely encircled the city in an endeavour to blind the bomb aimers. As we watched we could see a Wellington held by thirty or more searchlights, but he seemed completely unperturbed.

  Harris quickly followed up the Cologne raid with two more, to Essen and Bremen. I return to Bob’s logbook for the Essen attack, 1 June 1942. Here he has departed from his usual neat entries and written, ‘Crossed Heligoland’ in large writing followed by two large exclamation marks. ‘Oh yes,’ he says, peering at it and ruminating for a good while. ‘Bit of a mistake all that.’

  Today, Heligoland and the Fresian Islands in northern Germany are frequented by sea birds and tourists who come over from the mainland on weekend packages to enjoy their relatively warm and allergy-free climate. In the early 1940s, they formed a natural platform for anti-aircraft batteries protecting the approaches to the Ruhr, and were studded with guns. The RAF always tried to avoid them.

  ‘Actually, we didn’t intend to fly over them at all,’ says Bob. It was always going to be a difficult trip, relying on precise navigation by dead reckoning to a turning point sixty miles out in the North Sea. The meteorologists had warned that it was a dark and overcast night without much visibility.

  ‘There was a strong wind that night,’ he says. Tim Denny the navigator began making corrections to the course. ‘Lay off another five degrees,’ then a little later, ‘Lay off another ten degrees.’

  ‘We can’t be drifting that much!’ replied a concerned Bob, but Tim was adamant. ‘Well, we are. This is a hell of a strong wind.’ God knows where they were.

  According to Bob, some of the squadron never even found their target – the German airfield at Vechta near Bremen – running out of fuel and just disappearing into the sea en route. I read what he says in the journal for that night:

  We flew through some very bad weather – rain and thunder which gave us a fairly rough trip. The first sign of life was a shower of flak curling up at us when we thought we were still miles north of Germany; this turned out to be Heligoland which we all knew was very heavily defended. We had overshot our turning point by quite a distance.

  ‘We were out over the coast, the next thing we were over the island,’ Bob says. He gave up on the target and gave Tim permission to bomb ‘anything which looked suspicious’.

  Tim sighted something and we started our usual run-up. After ‘bombs gone’, I hardly took any evasive action as things were so quiet, but a few seconds later absolute hell was let loose. It was the most concentrated flak I had ever seen with several searchlights lending a hand. It seemed impossible to get away without being hit. Bill shouted that the heavy flak was dangerously close and to get down a bit. We were twisting and diving, but the ack-ack gunners followed us everywhere, finally at about 800 feet we got away to the east.

  ‘It turned out we bombed Borkum, one of the Frisian Islands and one of the most heavily defended places in the whole of Germany,’ says Bob, still slightly bemused by his foolhardiness in stirring up the hornet’s nest. ‘They probably wouldn’t have even bothered us if we’d just flown by.’

  I can see he is tiring and I ask whether I can somehow get a copy of his quite extraordinary document. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he answers.

  I read a little more as we drink some tea in the stately old room. As the journal goes on, I notice Bob’s writing become more confident. At the end of June 1942, he describes a trip across the North Sea to attack a German aerodrome at Herdla in Norway.

  I was most interested in my first sight of Norway as we came skimming in from the sea; we roared over several little fishing boats and could clearly see the Norwegians waving to us. One old chap asleep in the back of a little coastal boat got quite a fright as he saw 12 RAF planes go over his skiff at mast height.

  Locating the airfield only after several attempts, which sufficiently alerted the German night fighters, the operation was promptly abandoned and the squadron returned to England with their bombs. However, a few weeks later on 25 July they made another trip to attack the base of one of the most famous German night fighter squadrons in the Luftwaffe, Nachtjagdgeschwader 1 at St Trond in Belgium. This deadly unit was commanded by none other than Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer, the top-scoring German night fighter ace of the war with 121 victories to his credit – nearly all multi-engine bombers – and dubbed ‘The ghost of St Trond’. It’s estimated that he single-handedly accounted for the deaths of nearly a thousand RAF aircrew (he survived the war, only to die in a bizarre road accident in 1950, when a gas bottle fell on his head after his open-top sports car hit a truck).

  As Bob recounts in his journal, it was a ghostly night for No. 114 Squadron also. ‘This was the worst night the squadron had to date while I had been with them, as out of
eight crews who set out, we lost three.’

  Bob defied the odds and continued to fly trip after trip. As the squadron’s casualty rate mounted, his experience saw him rise quickly through the ranks. ‘I went from Pilot Officer to Squadron Leader in about four weeks because of the casualty rate,’ he says. ‘One time we flew up the Elbe River at water level. Practically the height of the cranes,’ he says, shaking his head at the memory of it.

  Once, I read, the German searchlights actually helped him over a target:

  The searchlights lit up a single-engine Hun last night – a night fighter after us probably – the pilot must have been cursing searchlight operators below.

  The journal continues for forty-three handwritten pages. Large chunks are left unchronicled, such as ‘August to November. The squadron did 293 night intruder sorties losing thirty crews.’ Then, as it says, they received their orders for the Middle East.

  Several pages read like a travel book describing the 1200-mile flight from Cornwall to Gibraltar through terrible weather:

  We were bumping about like a cork just below the cloud base at about 1800 feet. The Bay of Biscay looked very rough and forbidding.

  Eventually it cleared to a peaceful trip along the Portuguese coast, passing small ships in the bright azure sea which ‘took very little interest in us. It seemed hard to imagine we were at war’.

  Eight hours after leaving England, Bob touched down in Gibraltar. They had been loaded up with as much fuel as the old Blenheim could carry, with barely any margin for error allowed. ‘It was touch-and-go whether they could do the distance,’ he says. ‘You usually circled a new airfield when coming into it but we were told we wouldn’t have the petrol; we just had to go straight in and land.’ All four fuel tanks were showing empty as Bob came in to Gibraltar. ‘Two of our blokes never got there. We never found out what happened to them.’