Operation Thunderflash

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Dan was musical and played the piano well. I could see he didn’t much enjoy pounding some creaky old joanna in a pub or sergeants’ mess for his comrades’ raucous singing, but he did it. For his own pleasure he preferred Chopin.

  So Dan said, “Good,” and Keith Grey said, “Bloody good,” Eddie Hill said it was, “Effing well about time, an’ all,” and Ron Emery just raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

  Bruce Donaldson said nothing either, but his blunt and rugger-battered features broke into a rare smile while he further betrayed excitement by the vigour with which he thumped me on the shoulder.

  Nick Compton adjusted the knot of his tie, a habit he had when nervous, and made a noise that sounded like “H’m”. I said, “Who knows anything about U-Uncle?”

  It was Eddie, of course, who supplied the information: “Good kite, Skipper. She’s only done seven ops., and not a scratch on her.”

  “You sound like a second-hand car salesman,” I told him.

  “Done a bit of that, an’ all,” he declared happily. I believed him. If he’d told me he had sold Tower Bridge to an American tourist I would have believed that too. Even though he was no more than 14 when the last American tourists were seen in London, I was sure he was steeped in guile at the tenderest age.

  We went eagerly to find U for Uncle and take it up on air test.

  The sergeant in charge of the ground crew saluted me smartly enough but wore a sceptical, if not cynical, look; which did not upset me one little bit. He may have been older than I and with many more years in, but I was a fully-fledged operational pilot, by gad.

  Walking round the aeroplane doing the external checks I was glad to note that it looked almost pristine. There was some wearing of the paint along the leading edges of the wings, and a smear of oil or exhaust smoke here and there, but on the whole it looked reassuringly new.

  I was glad to know that it had never suffered any serious damage, which meant that everything should be in good working order; and that no one had been killed aboard, which meant that there were no ghosts to haunt it or grisly speculations to disturb us.

  I wished I knew where we were going that night. There were hours of suspense ahead of us. They knew, up at Group; and perhaps the Station Commander had been told; but those of us who were to do the dirty work had to wait until the last moment. It was all to do with security; but sometimes, of course, the target was not decided until late, long after we had done our night flying tests; our NFTs.

  After the air test we would have time to rest, then we would be briefed and learn what the job was to be; then we would eat our operational meal — the condemned man ate a hearty breakfast...but I mustn’t think like that — before we put on our flying kit. And then, finally, we would be taken out to our aircraft. The morbid thought came to me: like aristos in the tumbrils en route to Madame Guillotine. I felt ashamed of myself.

  We did not find the air test boring that morning. It was a rehearsal for the imminent Real Thing. I felt quite solemn about it when we began to test the intercom. I called each crew member in turn.

  “Pilot to navigator; testing.”

  “Loud and clear, Bill.”

  “Bomb-aimer?”

  “Aye, Skipper, I hear you.” A touch of formality from Bruce, that “Skipper”.

  “Flight Engineer?”

  “Everything OK, Captain.”

  The three others responded in the same way. As each voice reached me I pictured the speaker’s face, seeing my men alert at their positions, hoping they did not dread the night as much as I did.

  I raised my seat to its maximum and set about the first of the really important tasks; to see how the engines would respond. They burst successively into noisy life: port inner, starboard inner, port and starboard outers. A good healthy din filled Uncle and made it tremble from nose to tail and wingtip to wingtip. Ron Emery and I watched the gauges like hawks while we ran the engines up, did this and that with the magnetos, queried temperatures and pressures. If you got no other benefit from your RAF service, you learned to be thorough.

  Twelve minutes later I called the Control Tower on my R/T. “Permission to taxy, please. Over.”

  “Tower to U-Uncle One. Clear to taxy. Out.”

  We signalled, “chocks away”, the wooden blocks in front of the wheels were pulled aside, and, after one last look around outside to check for obstructions and to make sure nothing like an electricity cable was still connected to the aircraft, I opened the throttles a bit, released the brakes and sent U rolling down the taxy track.

  People complained about the lack of forward vision when taxying a Spitfire, with its long snout poking up ahead at a sharp angle. It wasn’t much better in a Lanc., with its prominent nose for the bomb-aimer and the twin-gun turret, its damn great engines and long, wide wings. Steering was done by braking: slow or stop one wheel and the aircraft slewed to that side. I drove this huge chunk of metal quite competently and it was odd to reflect that I had never driven a car. Most boys had a chance to practise on their fathers’ cars before they were old enough to have a driving license, but petrol rationing had deprived us of the family jalopy nearly four years ago. Perhaps I would find a car easy after a heavy bomber.

  We came to the end of the runway and turned diagonally across wind for a few more checks.

  I turned into wind, facing the long, rubber- and oil-streaked stretch of asphalt, and asked Ron for thirty degrees of flap.

  “Flaps thirty,” he repeated.

  We checked the radiators.

  “Throttles locked,” I said.

  -Throttles locked,” said Ron.

  “All clear behind, Rear Gunner?”

  The isolated voice answered, “All clear, Captain.”

  “Stand by for take-off. Full power, Engineer.”

  Uncle lurched forward, reminding me of a second-row forward gathering himself to charge down a place kick. It lumbered and rolled and creaked as its muscles warmed up and it slowly built up momentum. At first the propellers simply threshed the air without providing any lift, but soon the steady stream over the wings imparted a jaunty little bounce to Uncle’s massive form and it gave a few skittish leaps which presently, as the speed mounted past ninety and a hundred miles an hour, became a steady tug from the wings that demanded release from earth. At 110 m.p.h. I let Uncle glide up into its proper element with a firm backward pressure on the control column. It drifted to port a little and I applied correcting starboard rudder to bring it back over the centre line of the runway.

  “Undercarriage up,” I requested.

  Ron repeated what I had said, and, a moment later, added, “And locked. “

  “Thank you. Flaps up.”

  Up they came and we were away and climbing powerfully to 10,000 ft.; where we put our oxygen masks on and switched on the gas. Then down a couple of thousand and oxygen off, and we tried a few evasive tactics in preparation for attack by fighters.

  We returned to the airfield, entered the circuit, and presently Uncle was no longer a sun-cast shadow flitting over the green English countryside, but a vast black monster trundling, ungainly, along the taxy-track back to its dispersal point.

  We clambered out of the aircraft and the ground crew clustered around us, waiting to hear if we had any complaints. We talked about Uncle for a minute or two, I accepted the aircraft for the night’s operations and signed the Form 700, and we strolled hack to the crew room and then on to our messes for lunch.

  “How about a game of snooker?” asked Nick. He had taken up the game only since he joined the RAF, but his innate ball game player’s sense of angles had quickly made him good at it.

  “Find someone who’ll give you a decent game,” I declined. “I’m going to bed; to read for a bit until I doze off.” I shared a room with him. “Don’t wake me when you come in.

  I had read about Spanish bullfighters and their “Moment Of Truth” when they planted the sword in the wretched animal’s shoulders and risked death. I didn’t know that, thirty years lat
er, this really rather good phrase would have become cheapened into a cliché and used in all manner of unsuitable circumstances: so, that afternoon, I didn’t feel that my thought was hackneyed when I told myself that my moment of truth was at hand. But I was young and really believed that death in action was something that happened only to other people, and it did not prevent me from enjoying a good chunk of Hemingway that took me right out of myself with its story of Paris and Pamplona and the enigmatic Lady Brett Ashley and...yes, the impotent lover who was castrated by a bullet in the Great War...and that put the wind up me and kept me awake a bit longer than I would have liked. I had been re-reading that old favourite because I thought an old familiar tale would be the right antidote to my trepidation at facing something new and unfamiliar...but I had forgotten about the poor eunuch character and what it would do for my peace of mind to be reminded that there were certain parts of my seat in the aeroplane that were not armour plated. Later on I found these was one uxorious and lecherous pilot on the squadron who always flew with his steel helmet on his lap.

  It was important to me not to get my family jewels shot off, because I had never had a woman and I didn’t want to lose the chance altogether.

  After a cup of tea and a sandwich in the mess at four-o’clock, Bruce, Nick and I wandered over to briefing. Only the captain, navigator and bomb-aimer went to briefings, although the whole crew was wanted for de-briefing when we returned from an op. This was not some unhealthy distinction of rank or status, and in fact a good third of those who did attend briefings were NCOs and warrant officers. The reason for not summoning us all was simply a matter of capacity in the Briefing Room and the fact that neither the wireless op. nor the gunners had any need to be there. Also, with two squadrons on the station, each liable to put up as many as twelve aircraft on any night, there would have been 168 men at briefing if everyone had been let in. On occasions, we put up even as many as 30 aircraft each, which would have meant suffocation; and two or three sessions.

  Going to briefing that first time I felt a sense of occasion, but I also felt bereft without the whole of my crew there to share in it. I would have welcomed Dan Feldman’s sharp, quiet attention to supplement my own, and Ron Emery’s long experience of Service routine.

  The Briefing Room filled a big wooden hut that echoed hollowly until it began to fill up. We were among the first arrivals and sat near the front on a bench, behind three rows of collapsible chairs. At the end was a dais with a map of Europe on the wall behind it. This map was the immediate focus of everyone’s eyes on entering the room: because on it was a red ribbon marking the route for that night; which ended at the target.

  Even we realised what the red ribbon portended, without having to be told.

  I held my breath for a moment: it looked an awfully long strip of ribbon. But, on looking closer, it wasn’t so bad. No long graunch to Berlin, Dresden or Leipzig. Almost a quick in-and-out, really: to Cologne. And no long drag across France, either, but across to the coast of Holland and a couple of turns for a quick dart across the narrow Netherlands and a few miles of western Germany. And back again by the same swift overland route to the sea.

  As the room filled up people’s remarks were uninhibited. Cologne was pretty generally condemned: we gathered that the flak was impenetrable around the target, and not much better along the way; despite the fairly short duration of our overland passage. From some of the comments we concluded that practically the whole of the German night fighter force was congregated across our path.

  Nick whispered, “I bet this lot of pessimists would say the same if the target was Le Touquet...or Weston-super-Mare. “

  Bruce, also whispering, agreed: “If there were so many guns and fighters, they wouldn’t have enough to defend the rest of their rotten country.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” I told them. But it wasn’t, for I had been so accustomed to under-statement all my life that I presumed these chaps must be telling only half the tale with their dire allusions.

  When everyone was assembled the two Squadron Commanders went out to report the fact to the Station Commander, Group Captain Jevons, who had arrived outside in the past minute. When they entered the room we all stood up and the Station CO called out to us to sit down again as he was walking the length of the hall towards the dais.

  We had each had a brief interview with the group captain on our first day, and I had seen him in the mess a few times, but didn’t know much about him. He looked pretty much a standard-issue Bomber Command group captain of the day: medium height, chunky, mid-forties, weatherbeaten, moustached a trifle exaggeratedly. He wore a DSO and a DFC won in the past four years as a two-tour commander of a flight and a squadron, and a Military Cross won as a young pilot in the Great War; with the War Medal, the Victory Medal and the General Service Medal which could have meant Iraq, Palestine, India or other places. He was a hearty, press-on character who was perfectly in his element in a war and as leader of a body of men whom he commanded by example and not by precept alone. I had no doubt that he was the stuff of which Air Marshals were made; and he scared the living daylights out of me because he gave me the impression that he was indestructible himself and sent us all off on hellish missions in which we needed to be indestructible as well.

  There were a lot of black-painted wooden models of friendly and enemy aircraft hanging from the ceiling of the Briefing Room, as there were in the Intelligence section and elsewhere about the camp. I took my eyes off the group captain and gazed at a Messerschmitt 110: in some way the two seemed to have a lot in common.

  The group captain spoke to us exactly as I thought he would. It occurred to me that, by some genetic process, Air Ministry could breed any number of Gp. Capt. Jevonses, dress them alike, and equip them with a gramophone and records, and then all they would have to do would be to stand up in front of us and mime while the record played.

  jolly good target for tonight...very important...can’t stress importance enough...essential to clobber the railway marshalling yards and the bridge without error...jolly good show for us...marshalling yards a piece of cake...bridge a bit tricky, but well within the capability of the senior crews...jolly good...”

  The senior Intelligence officer told us how many other squadrons and aircraft were operating on the same raid and where they came from. He ran his pointer along the ribbon that marked our track. He pointed out the flak sites, which everyone but us knew only too well already, and made some optimistic predictions about the thinness of them and our cunning route that would deceive the enemy about our intentions and, indeed, our very presence in his air space.

  A warrant officer pilot and his sergeant navigator and bomb-aimer, just behind us, spoke very rudely and coarsely under their breath at this point and depressed me just when I was beginning to make light of the whole thing myself.

  The SIO waffled on about the Pathfinders who could mark the targets, and what we should do if we had, or did not yet have, the new H2S radar bombing equipment. He told us we would be carrying this or that and another sort of bomb in our various loads.

  After him, the Meteorological officer, who was a civilian weather forecaster before the war, a civil servant in uniform now, told us that the weather was going to be good en route, good over the target, and good on the way back to base. In the face of so much good news I barely restrained myself from cheering.

  The two Squadron Commanders each said a brief word, then Wg. Cdr. Leatham made the more impact, with a succinct summary of the main points to remember during our attack and a few detailed orders. His brother CO said less and ended by saying he would see all his captains and bomb-aimers in the crew room immediately after we dispersed.

  The group captain and the two wing cos filed out. We all stood up, stretched, discussed the briefing, the route, the target, loudly: I wondered who was listening to anyone else. Nick, even the taciturn Bruce, and I were all speaking at once.

  “Seems quite a piece of cake...” Nick.

  “Och, it’s not s
o bad for a first timer...” Bruce.

  “Let’s go and tell the others...” Me.

  More time to kill now, and a portentous air encompassing the station. From now on, the whole camp was cut off from the outside world: no telephone calls out, no one to leave camp except a few with special clearance and no access to information on the target.

  The long trains of bomb trolleys were still being towed out to the aircraft and the 4,000-pounders, the 8,000-pounders and the incendiaries being loaded.

  That in itself was almost as dicey as flying on ops. A faulty fuse, a bomb dropped, a defective detonator, could, and from time to time did, blow up an aircraft and all the armourers within a wide radius.

  I saw the bomb trolleys trundling along the tarmac and the grass and thought how ugly the bombs looked and what I was about to do really meant.

  With those great steel canisters and those finned objects that looked like giant darts, I was going to spread destruction far and wide, set fires going, kill people and burn down buildings. Until now I had thought of ops. only as an exercise in skill at hitting an aiming point with...with something...not a package of killing, maiming high explosive...just something that would be dropped — note the passive, not the active — from our aircraft. Dropped by Bruce. I would merely deliver him and the goods to the precise point in space from which he could do it with maximum precision.

  To hell with it, that was what Jerry did to us every night. And enough friends, relations and acquaintances of my family’s had been under the load when Jerry dropped it.

  Looking at that procession of bomb trains I had no regrets or remorse about the realities of my task.

  I was more concerned with the sky and the wind sock. Despite what the met. man had said, I worried about a change in the weather and a scrub: that would be too much, after bracing ourselves all day.