Aircrew: The Story of the Men Who Flew the Bombers

by Bruce Lewis

  Compared with the colossal tonnage of later years, the weight of bombs dropped on Germany by the RAF in 1940 was negligible. Yet the efforts of those valiant pioneers were far from wasted. Their attacks on the enemy brought a fierce satisfaction to those inhabitants of Britain who had suffered from the Luftwaffe’s bombing. It is true that official propaganda made the effect of these raids on the Third Reich seem far more devastating than it really was. A publication issued by His Majesty’s Stationery Office called Bomber Command presented a glowing report of what was being achieved. While admitting that our bomber force was not yet as big as the RAF would wish, it was, it said, nonetheless producing remarkable results. The book contained an inspiring map, captioned: ‘Attack at the Heart: The Raids on Germany’. It covered an area from the Baltic, south as far as Munich, and east beyond Dresden and Stettin. Against every major town and city in Germany were printed clusters of bombs in varying sizes. These bombs were grouped according to the number of raids supposed to have taken place on each target. Symbols represented munition works, power stations, aerodromes, seaplane bases, aircraft works, oil refineries, railways, docks and waterways, naval ships, and an all-embracing symbol entitled ‘various objectives’. Without doubt all these missions had been mounted, but how many targets had been hit, and by what number of aircraft, was not detailed.

  The book was notable for some excellent photographs of Whitleys, Hampdens, Wellingtons and Blenheims, and crew members at their various stations inside the aircraft. There were action shots of bombs falling (by day of course), and aerial views of apparent damage to enemy installations by high explosive. It is significant that the ‘damage’ had to be pinpointed by arrows drawn across the photographs, in contrast to reconnaissance pictures taken in the later stages of the war when the devastation was all too obvious.

  Even the smallest raid occasionally had an effect on the recipients out of all proportion to its destructive value. An outstanding example was a mission reported by an American correspondent, William L. Shirer. He was living in Berlin at the time when the USA was still neutral. During that period Germany also had a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. He wrote:

  At this point in the conversation, say the German minutes, the Führer called attention to the late hour and stated that in view of the possibility of English air raid attacks it would be better to break off the talk now, since the main issues had probably been sufficiently discussed.

  That night Molotov gave a gala banquet to his hosts at the Russian Embassy on the Unter den Linden. Hitler, apparently exhausted and still irritated by the afternoon’s ordeal, did not put in an appearance.

  The British did. I had wondered why their bombers had not appeared over Berlin, as they had almost every night, to remind the Soviet Commissar on his first evening in the capital that, whatever the Germans told him, Britain was still in the war and kicking. Some of us, I confess, had waited hopefully for the planes, but they had not come. Officials in the Wilhelmstrasse, who had feared the worst, were visibly relieved. But not for long.

  On the evening of November 13, [1940], the British came over early. It gets dark in Berlin about 4 pm at this time of the year, and shortly after 9 o’clock the air-raid sirens began to whine and then you could hear the thunder of the flak guns and, in between, the hum of the bombers overhead … Molotov had just proposed a friendly toast and Ribbentrop [the Nazi Foreign Minister] had risen to his feet to reply when the air-raid warning was sounded and the guests scattered to shelter.

  In the safety of the underground shelter of the Foreign Ministry conversation continued between the Germans and the Russians. … Molotov stated that the Germans were assuming that the war against England had already actually been won. If therefore [as Hitler had maintained] Germany was waging a life and death struggle against England, he could only construe this as meaning that Germany was fighting ‘for life’ and England ‘for death’.

  This sarcasm may have gone over the head of Ribbentrop, a man of monumental denseness, but Molotov took no chances. To the German’s constant reiteration that Britain was finished, the Commissar finally replied, ‘If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are those bombs which fall?’

  (From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)

  Winston Churchill wrote that the air raid was actually timed for this occasion:

  We had heard of the conference beforehand, and though not invited to join in the discussions did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.

  How small that raid must have been, when compared with the massed onslaughts of later years, can be seen by consulting the ‘Bomber Command War Diaries’:

  13/14 November, 1940. 72 Hampdens, Wellingtons and Whitleys to 5 targets. 1 Hampden was mistakenly shot down by a Spitfire soon after its take-off. A further Hampden and Whitley were lost. Only 15 aircraft reached primary targets.

  Fifteen bombers spread over five targets hardly represents a weighty attack, especially on a city as large as Berlin. It is likely that falling shell fragments from the defending anti-aircraft guns caused at least as much distress as the British bombs.

  Yet Bomber Command never gave up trying. The following night fifty aircraft set off for Berlin again. Only half that number reported reaching the city. Ten aircraft – four Hampdens, four Whitleys and two Wellingtons, were lost from this and other bombing missions that night, the heaviest night loss sustained by the RAF up to that time. Forty-six airmen of Bomber Command would not fly again.

  At the beginning of 1941 Bomber Command planned to concentrate on bombing oil-processing plants as soon as the weather improved. From mid-February this became possible and the attacks began. But, as so often happened with Bomber Command campaigns, the force had to be diverted to other matters, in this instance after only one month. Britain, who the previous year had repulsed the German attempts to subdue her airpower, was now in dire peril at sea. Her vital lifeline with America, the shipping that plied back and forth across the Atlantic, was in imminent danger of being cut. Vessels were being torpedoed and bombed and shelled to the bottom of the ocean at an alarming rate. U-boats, long range Focke-Wulfe Kondors, and fast, heavily armed surface-raiders were all taking their toll.

  Bomber Command was asked to forget the synthetic oil targets for the present and concentrate its efforts on bombing the shipyards building the submarines in ports such as Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen, also inland targets like Mannheim – home of the marine diesel engine. In addition, airfields as far apart as Norway and France had to be attacked in order to frustrate the activities of the huge, four-engine Kondors which had been ranging far out into the Atlantic, well beyond the reach of RAF fighters.

  This was not all. When the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau docked in Brest, the port was bombed continuously, preventing the two warships from returning to the Atlantic

  The bases from which the U-boats embarked on their raids, Bordeaux, St Nazaire and Lorient, were attacked time after time. The Germans, using slave labour, were forced to construct massive concrete U-boat pens as a result of these operations. Towards the end of the war Dr Barnes Wallis put a weapon into the hands of Bomber Command that would demolish these hitherto impregnable fortifications.

  At the beginning of this phase, small numbers of the new generation of big bombers began to arrive on some squadrons. Four of the twin-engined Avro Manchesters and three four-engined Handley Page Halifaxes joined eighty-one of the older aircraft in a raid on Hamburg’s Blohm & Voss U-boat yards. This was in mid-March, 1941. A month earlier the cumbersome four-engined Short Stirling had flown on its first operation.

  The ageing Whitleys and Hampdens would continue to play their part for more than another year, but like old soldiers they honourably began to fade away during this period. Not so the robust, trouble-free Wellington which had become the mainstay of Bomber Command and would remain in this role for some time to come.

  Now, a year and a half after the outbreak of war, the fresh volunteer crews were beginning to join the
squadrons to take their place beside flyers who had carried the war to the enemy since the beginning. These were the young men who had trained as aircrew cadets, some abroad under the Empire Air Training Scheme, others in Britain. All had come together to form themselves into crews at Operational Training Units in the British Isles.

  Most of the chapters that follow are based on first-hand accounts told to me by some of these men, many who were no more than boys when they volunteered for flying duties. In some instances dialogue has been included. Purists may object to this on the grounds that no conversation can be accurately reported after a lapse of half a century. In reply I would suggest that we are not dealing here with ordinary conversation, but recalling remarks sometimes made under circumstances of extreme emergency and danger, leading to heightened emotion, stress and fear. At such times, what is sensed, seen, smelt and heard, including the spoken word, can often be etched indelibly on the memory. In relating events, both in the air and on the ground, these one-time aircrew sometimes brought an added vitality to their recollections by remembering what they or their companions had said on certain occasions. Statements or orders from superior officers were also recalled when those words bore a particular significance. To have ignored these snatches of quoted dialogue would, I believe, have reduced the sense of atmosphere unique to those days, and, worse, broken faith with men who have taken the trouble to tell me about their experiences.

  TWO

  The Pilot/Navigator

  In the earlier part of the war, RAF training for pilots followed much the same pattern as that which had existed in peacetime. Instruction up to the stage where a pupil was able to demonstrate his competence in handling a single-engine aircraft, coupled with a knowledge of related subjects such as navigation and theory of flight, had varied little over the years. In Chapter Six we shall be following a pilot cadet through this initial phase of his training in more detail.

  After the award of his ‘Wings’, continuity of training, at least for the potential bomber pilot, sometimes went adrift during those earlier days. Lack of specialization, or a shortage in certain aircrew categories, meant that less experienced pilots were occasionally used to perform other flying duties, particularly as navigators, for which they were not fully qualified. While struggling in these unfamiliar roles time slipped by, denying them the chance to build up valuable operational hours as pilots and captains of their own aircraft.

  This situation existed mainly through a shortage of bombers and a scarcity of trained navigators. The story of how this affected one volunteer, who became ‘the bomber pilot who never was’, is related below:

  Leslie Biddlecombe, who lived in Orpington, was educated at Highfield College, Leigh-on-Sea. At 19 he was a clerk at the Lombard Street branch of the Westminster Bank. He was a tall, thin, pale-skinned young man. On the day war was declared he walked into an army recruiting office on Bromley Common, having decided to join the Buffs. The office was empty. Although he waited for some time, nobody turned up. He went home disillusioned. A small circumstance, but it changed the course of his life. He made up his mind to volunteer for flying duties with the RAF instead.

  It was not until the following July (1940) that he was summoned to RAF Uxbridge. Accompanied by his father, Leslie was interviewed by a Wing Commander. He remembers little of what was said at the meeting, but he does recall that both he and his father were impressed with the Wing Commander’s bright blue eyes!

  Having been found acceptable, it was then necessary to undergo a stringent medical examination. To pass Tit Aircrew A1’ was a guarantee of fitness above the standard demanded by any other branch of the Services. The difficulty in Leslie’s case was that he had suffered with asthma since the age of six. At school he had been unable to play football or take part in any of the more strenuous sports. Wednesday afternoons were set aside for outside activities, but, as often as not, he spent the time with his mother at the cinema.

  However, he decided to bluff his way through as best he could. He was going to answer no to asthma when they ran through the list of ailments – any one of which automatically disqualified an applicant. He felt he had a chance of deceiving the RAF doctors because he had been told that asthma was undetectable unless actually in spasm. What worried him most was the breath control test. In this one was required to blow down a rubber pipe and hold some mercury steady in a glass tube for a minimum length of time. Before the event, he had assiduously practised deep breathing and holding his breath. When the time came he kept the mercury in position for about 1½ minutes, which was acceptable, and had no particular trouble with any of the other tests.

  Enlisted as an Aircraftman 2nd Class, Aircrew Cadet, his first two weeks in the RAF were spent in a Receiving Centre at Babbac-ombe in Devon. Here he was kitted out with his uniform. Billeted with others in the four-star Sefton Hotel, Leslie found the accommodation less luxurious than the exterior of the building suggested. Stripped down to the bare boards, it contained no more than rows of iron-framed beds.

  It was here that they suffered their first casualty. The cadets received some inoculations and were warned not to indulge in any alcohol for the time being. Unfortunately, one of their number could not resist sampling the local cider. He imbibed liberally after being jabbed – and died.

  Then followed a hectic period at the Initial Training Wing in Paignton – long sessions of lectures on navigation, meteorology, theory of flight, morse and RAF law. Classroom studies were punctuated by periods of strenuous physical exercises and foot drill. Leslie revelled in all this activity and enjoyed a fitness he had never known before. The stuffy days spent in the bank were completely forgotten. ‘Lights Out’ was at 9 o’clock in the evening but the cadets were so tired by the end of the day that no one objected to early bed.

  After six weeks the course entrained for the Elementary Flying Training School at Burnaston in Derbyshire. Those cadets who had successfully completed basic training – by no means all of them – were now promoted to Leading Aircraftmen. The time had arrived to learn to fly an aeroplane.

  The majority of teenagers during the 1930s and ’40s had very little money to spend on themselves, and were limited in their choice of spare-time activities. Leslie knew nothing of mechanical matters, had never seen an aircraft at close quarters, and had no idea how to drive a car. So all this was a novel experience – the gateway to a new and adventurous world.

  They were taken up in Miles Magisters – single-engine monoplanes with two open cockpits, one for the instructor, the other for his pupil. The aircraft, of course, was fitted with dual controls. Presumably to instil a sense of respect for this machine, it was explained that it had at least one advantage over the Tiger Moth, the RAF’s other basic trainer – the Magister, they said, had brakes!

  In those first overwhelming moments, overcome by the miracle of flying through the air at 3,000 feet, Leslie gripped the ‘stick’ for dear life with both hands. The pilot, who was in complete control, urged him to relax and take things more easily. After a surprisingly short time he found he was getting the hang of the controls – he actually enjoyed doing some straight and level flying, a little gliding and climbing, even a few gentle turns.

  Leslie was aware that some of the pupils, although putting on brave faces, were worried about their ability to pass the course. Others seemed sublimely confident. One cadet complained about the way his instructor ordered him to execute certain manoeuvres in the air, and then made it impossible for him to carry out these instructions by moving the controls in the opposite direction. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take things into my own hands and force the controls the way I want them to go!’ Within a few days he had been ‘washed out’ and posted away.

  Leslie was among the less confident pupils. He was uncertain whether or not he was making satisfactory progress. One of his consolations was his immunity to air-sickness (yet, strangely, he is sea-sick on the calmest of waters). His greatest shock came when, without warning, his instructor put the Magister
into a spin. A moment before, strapped into the open cockpit, he had felt content and secure with the aircraft in level flight.

  In an instant his sense of well-being was shattered as he was thrust forward and saw the earth rushing up towards him. 1,000 feet was lost in no time. As the pilot pulled out, he asked his pupil if he was all right. Leslie called back down the speaking tube, and said, with an assurance that he was far from feeling, Tes thanks, sir. I’m fine!’

  ‘Excellent!’said his instructor, who promptly pushed the stick forward and went into a second spin! Another 1,000 feet disappeared from the altimeter. Now only 800/900 feet above the ground, Leslie was mightily relieved when he realized no further spins were contemplated.

  Not long afterwards he was carrying out this acrobatic manoeuvre himself – stick forward and opposite rudder – a little apprehensive for fear of overdoing it. Then a gentle pull back on the stick … coming out of the spin … rush of blood to the head as G forces exert pressure … no ill effects … feeling fine.

  Flying brought its own brand of tiredness – a deep, all-pervading weariness that Leslie had never experienced before. It was enough to sit sprawled in the mess in the evenings, listening to the fascinating variety of dialects spoken by his fellow cadets. Some, from certain areas of northern England particularly, were difficult to understand. On the other hand, volunteers from overseas, from the colonies, expressed themselves in fresh and colourful speech that was easy to follow.