Aircrew: The Story of the Men Who Flew the Bombers

by Bruce Lewis

  The Bursell crew flew their final operation three days later. It was in yet another brand-new Lancaster, our third G George, the other two having literally been shot to pieces under us. The raid on Düsseldorf was almost an anti-climax. We bombed an armament centre supplying the front line, and only encountered moderate flak in our wave. As we crossed the Dutch coast on the way home, Jim called me up on the intercom: ‘Well, that looks like it for real this time, Bruce. Will you and Miki be getting married now?’ ‘That’s the intention,’ I replied. ‘What are you going to do, Jim?’

  We were roughly above The Hague at that moment. Jim said, ‘Before the war I used to be an executive with the Shell Oil Company. I’ ve got an office down there somewhere. I’ d like to think that when this lot is over, my chair will still be waiting!’ Normally, when flying, this well-disciplined crew only spoke when it was vital to do so. But now, with the tour all but over, each member in turn talked of what he hoped to do after the war. I thought I knew them well, but at this moment they were adding a new dimension to their personalities – drawing an image of what sort of people they might be in the future. Now they felt certain there was going to be a future.

  We celebrated in style the following evening, and with us, of course, was the ‘other’ crew, the one who had kept our kites flying trip after trip. Never grumbling, working in all weathers, they had performed near-miracles. We pulled each others’ legs unceasingly: ‘We’ d no sooner fixed up the poor old kite when you buggers bent it again!’. ‘It’s a wonder we ever got there, the way you bodged it up!’. ‘You had more G Georges, Jim, than me and the lads have had hot dinners!’ Magical, memorable moments, never to be repeated. Soon we would shake hands and not meet again.

  Next day Jim cornered me as I was on my way to Signals. Grinning, he said, ‘A couple of your high-level contacts want to see you right away.’ Sensing a trap, I replied, ‘Oh, yes?’ ‘Yes,’ he insisted, ‘The Air Commodore and Groupy King.’ Now I knew he was having me on. I had had a couple of informal chats with the Group Captain, but the Base Commander? That was like an appointment with God! But I was wrong; they had requested to see me!

  Group Captain King interviewed me first. After some preliminary chat, he suddenly said, ‘By the way, Lewis, you are recommended for an immediate commission. Get washed and shaved. Polish your buttons and shoes. Then, in your best blue, report to the AOC in half an hour. He’s expecting you. Good luck!’

  Air Commodore Blucke, soon to become an Air Vice-Marshal, and the last wartime AOC of 1 Group, Bomber Command, looked at me disapprovingly. ‘You’ ve been a bad lad in your time, Lewis.’ He had a thick file open on his desk – my service career to date. All at once I remembered various ‘crimes’ I had committed in my training days. Breaking out of camp; being improperly dressed; showing disrespect to a corporal. There was no chance that this stern-looking man would consider me as suitable officer material. Then he stood up. ‘Coming up through the ranks as you have, Lewis, should stand you in good stead now you are about to become an officer. Don’t let me down.’ He held out his hand. ‘Well done. Congratulations!’

  I cannot imagine that anyone flying with 101 Squadron would knowingly let down either Air Commodore Blucke or Group Captain King. Officially, because of their rank, neither was supposed to fly on operations. Yet both men considered morale and esprit de corps of paramount importance. They maintained these vital qualities in the squadron by personal example. They were the living embodiment of the 101 Squadron spirit. From time to time when the going had been rough, and the losses high, King picked a crew and flew as pilot, while Blucke, an experienced Lancaster pilot himself, chose to fly as a rear gunner, invariably with an all-sergeant crew. Had they become prisoners of war, the puzzlement on the face of the German interrogating officer would have been great indeed. An Air Officer gunner taking orders from a Sergeant pilot must have been unique in the annals of air war!

  At 2400 hours that night I ceased to be a Flight-Sergeant and one minute later became a Pilot Officer. It was my 21st birthday. Remaining on the squadron until Christmas, I managed to eat three Christmas dinners on the festive day, two with Miki and friends living in the village, and an official one in the mess that evening where, as the most junior officer, I had to propose the ‘Loyal Toast’. I was pleased to find that I could still rise to my feet!

  Regretfully posted away from 101 Squadron in the new year, (the rest of my crew had long since gone), I became first an Instructor, then an Intelligence Officer, working in 8 Group HQ, at Huntingdon, for Pathfinders. I flew with some of them in a Lancaster to Berlin immediately after the war ended to view the awful devastation; and finally rounded off my service as the RAF’s first radio newsreader in Europe, broadcasting from the Telefun-ken House in Hamburg. In a way, events had gone full circle.

  Most important, I returned to 101 Squadron in the Spring of 1945. Miki and I were married in the little church of Ludford Magna. Max Dolette, the Australian ‘Special’, gave the bride away. There was no confetti, but a Canadian crew climbed on the porch and showered us with ‘Window’.

  NINE

  The Co-Pilot

  The courageous aircrew who flew the B-17 Fortresses and B-24 Liberators of the United States 8th Army Air Force stationed in Britain followed a policy of bombing only by day, in the belief that strength in numbers and collective fire power would see them through to the target and back. The RAF had found this policy disastrous in the early days of the war, and the Americans, too, suffered bitter disappointments and grim losses during their initial daylight missions.

  Flying first to Rouen on 17 August, 1942, it was well over a year before the Americans were really able to get into their stride. Britain, whose factories were fully stretched in supplying her own forces, was unable to help beyond providing the USAAF with air bases. Every bomber, every nut and bolt, in fact all material, including food, had to cross the Atlantic from the USA. It was a gigantic logistic exercise. Eventually they won through, but only after a long and bloody struggle. The mastery of the German Luftwaffe came with the development of the long-range escort fighter and improved tactics born out of hard experience.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Beirne Lay, Jr. left his desk as a staff officer to fly with his comrades on missions over Germany. There could be no better description than his of how the 8th AAF went to war:

  In the briefing room, the Intelligence Officer of the bombardment group pulled a cloth screen away from a huge wall map. Each of the 240 sleepy-eyed combat-crew members in the crowded room leaned forward. There were low whistles. I felt a sting of anticipation as I stared at the red string on the map that stretched from our base in England to a pinpoint deep in Southern Germany, then across the Alps, through the Brenner Pass to the coast of Italy, then past Corsica and Sardinia and south over the Mediterranean to a desert airdrome in North Africa. You could have heard an oxygen mask drop.

  ‘Your primary,’said the Intelligence Officer, ‘is Regensburg. Your aiming point is the centre of the Messerschmitt 109G aircraft and assembly shops. This is the most vital target we’ ve ever gone after. If you destroy it, you destroy thirty percent of the Luftwaffe’s single-engine fighter production. You fellows know what that means to you personally.’

  There were a few hollow laughs.

  After the briefing, I climbed aboard a jeep bound for the operations office to check up on my Fortress assignment. The stars were dimly visible through the chilly mist that covered our blacked-out bomber station, but the weather forecast for a deep penetration over the Continent was good. In the office I looked at the crew sheet, where the line-up of the lead, low and high squadrons of the group is plotted for each mission. I was listed for a co-pilot’s seat.

  While I stood there, and on a chance suggestion of one of the squadron commanders who was looking over the list, the Operations Officer erased my name and shifted me to the high squadron as co-pilot in the crew of a steady Irishman named Lieutenant Murphy, with whom I had flown before. Neither of us knew it, but that Op
erations Officer saved my life right there with a piece of rubber on the end of a pencil.

  At 5.30 am, 15 minutes before taxi time, a jeep drove round the five-mile perimeter track in the semi-darkness, pausing at each dispersal point long enough to notify the waiting crews that poor local visibility would postpone the take-off for an hour and a half. I was sitting with Murphy and the rest of our crew near the ‘Piccadilly Lily’. She looked sinister and complacent, squatting on her fat tyres with scarcely a hole in her skin to show for the twelve raids behind her.

  The postponement heightened, rather than relaxed, the tension. Once more I checked over my life vest, oxygen mask and parachute, not perfunctorily, but the way you check something you’ re going to have to use. I made sure my escape kit was pinned securely in the knee pocket of my flying suit, where it wouldn’t fall out in a scramble to abandon ship. I slid a hunting knife between my shoe and my flying boot as I looked again through my extra equipment for this mission: water canteen, mess kit, blankets and English pounds for use in the Algerian desert, where we could sleep on the ground and might be on our own from a forced landing.

  Murphy restlessly gave the ‘Piccadilly Lily’ another once-over, inspecting ammunition belts, bomb bay, tyres and oxygen – it’s human fuel, as important as gasoline – at the height where we operate. Gunners field-stripped their.50-calibres again and oiled the bolts. Our top-turret gunner lay on the grass with his head on his parachute, feigning sleep, sweating out his 13th start.

  We shared a common knowledge which grimly enhanced the normal excitement before a mission. Of the approximately 150 Fortresses who were hitting Regensburg, our group was the last and lowest, at a base altitude of 17,000 feet. That’s well within the range of accuracy for heavy flak. Our course would take us over plenty of it. It was a cinch also that our group would be the softest touch for the enemy fighters, being last man through the gauntlet. Furthermore, the ‘Piccadilly Lily’ was leading the last three ships of the high squadron – the tip of the tail end of the whole shebang. We didn’t relish it much. Who wants a Purple Heart?

  The minute hand of my wrist watch dragged. I caught myself thinking about the day, exactly one year ago, on 17 August, 1942, when I watched a pitifully small force of twelve B-17s take off on the first raid of the 8th Air Force to make a shallow penetration against Rouen, France. On that day it was our maximum effort. Today, on our first anniversary, we were putting thirty times that number of heavies into the air – half the force on Regensburg and half the force on Schweinfurt, both situated inside the interior of the Reich.

  For a year and a half, as a staff officer, I had watched the 8th Air Force grow under Major-General Ira C. Eaker. That’s a long time to watch from behind a desk. Only ten days ago I had asked for and received the order to go on combat duty. Those ten days had been full of the swift action of participating in four combat missions and checking out for the first time as a four-engine pilot.

  Now I knew that it can be easier to be shot at than telephoned at. The staff officers at an Air Force headquarters are the unsung heroes of the war. And yet I found myself reminiscing just a little affectionately about that desk, wondering if there wasn’t a touch of suicide in store for our group. One thing was sure: Headquarters had dreamed up the biggest air operation to date to celebrate its birthday in the biggest league of aerial warfare.

  At 7.30 am we broke out of the cloud tops into the glare of the rising sun. Beneath our B-17 lay English fields still blanketed in the thick mist from which we had just emerged. We continued to climb slowly, our broad wings shouldering a heavy load of incendiary bombs in the belly and a burden of fuel in the main and wing-tip Tokyo tanks that would keep the Fortress afloat in the thin upper altitudes for eleven hours.

  From my co-pilot’s seat on the right-hand side I watched the white surface of the overcast, where B-17s in clusters of six to each squadron were puncturing the cloud deck all about us, rising clear of the mist with their glass noses slanted upward for the long climb to base altitude. We tacked on to one of these clutches of six. Now the sky over England was heavy with the weight of thousands of tons of bombs, fuel and men being lifted four miles straight up on a giant aerial hoist, to the western terminus of a 20,000 feet elevated highway that led east to Regensburg. At intervals I saw the arc of a spluttering red, green or yellow flare being fired from the cabin roof of a group leader’s airplane to identify the lead squadron to the high and low squadrons of each group. Assembly takes longer when you come up through an overcast.

  For nearly an hour, still over Southern England, we climbed, nursing the straining Cyclone engines in a 300-feet-per-minute ascent, forming three squadrons gradually into compact group stagger formations – low squadron down to the left and high squadron up to the right of the lead squadron – groups assembling into looser combat wings of two or three groups each along the combat-wing assembly line, homing over predetermined points with radio compass, and finally cruising along the air-division assembly line to fall into place in trail behind Colonel Curtis E. Le May in the lead group of the air division.

  Formed at last, each flanking group in position 1000 feet above or below its lead group, our 15-mile parade moved east towards Lowestoft, point of departure from the friendly coast, unwieldy but dangerous to fool with. From my perch on the high squadron in the last element of the whole procession, the air division looked like a huge anvil-shaped swarm of locusts – not on dress parade, like the bombers of the Luftwaffe that died like flies over Britain in 1940, but deployed to uncover every gun and permit manoeuvr-ability. Our formation was basically that worked out for the Air Corps by Brigadier General Hugh Kneer 20 years ago with 85 miles per hour bombers, plus refinements devised by Colonel Le May from experience in the European theatre.

  The English Channel and the North Sea glittered bright in the clear visibility as we left the bulge of East Anglia behind us. Up ahead we knew we were already registering on the German RDF screen, and that the sector controllers of the Luftwaffe’s fighter belt in Western Europe were busy alerting their Staffeln of Focke-Wulfes and Messerschmitts. I stole a last look back at cloud-covered England, where I could see a dozen spare B-17s, who had accompanied us to fill in for any abortives from mechanical failure in the hard climb, gliding disappointedly home to base.

  I fastened my oxygen mask a little tighter and looked at the little ball in a glass tube on the instrument panel that indicates proper oxygen flow. It was moving up and down, like a visual heartbeat, as I breathed, registering normal.

  Already the gunners were searching. Occasionally the ship shivered as guns were tested with short bursts. I could see puffs of blue smoke from the group close ahead and 1000 feet below us, as each gunner satisfied himself that he had lead poisoning at his finger tips. The coast of Holland appeared in sharp black outline. I drew in a deep breath of oxygen.

  A few miles in front of us were German boys in single-seaters who were probably going to react to us in the same way our boys would react, emotionally, if German bombers were heading for the Pratt & Whitney engine factory at Hartford or the Liberator plant at Willow Run. In the making was a death struggle between the unstoppable object and the immovable defence, every possible defence at the disposal of the Reich, for this was a deadly penetration to a hitherto inaccessible and critically important arsenal of the Vaterland.

  At 10.08 we crossed the coast of Holland, south of The Hague, with our group of Fortresses tucked in tightly and within handy supporting distance of the group above us, at 18,000 feet. But our long, loose-linked column looked too long, and the thin gaps between combat wings too wide. As I squinted into the sun, gauging the distance to the barely visible specks of the lead group, I had a recurrence of that sinking feeling before the take-off – the lonesome foreboding that might come to the last man about to run a gauntlet lined with spiked clubs. The premonition was well-founded.

  At 10.17, near Woensdrecht, I saw the first flak blossom out in our vicinity, light and inaccurate. A few minutes later, at
approximately 10.25, a gunner called, ‘Fighters at 2 o’clock low’. I saw them, climbing above the horizon ahead of us to the right – a pair of them. For a moment I hoped they were P-47 Thunderbolts from the fighter escort that was supposed to be in our vicinity, but I didn’t hope long. The two FW-190s turned and whizzed through the formation ahead of us in a frontal attack, nicking two B-17s in the wings and breaking away in half-rolls right over our group. By craning my neck up and back, I glimpsed one of them through the roof glass in the cabin, flashing past at a 600-mile-an-hour rate of closure, his yellow nose smoking and small pieces flying off near the wing root. The guns of our group were in action. The pungent smell of burnt cordite filled the cockpit and the B-17 trembled to the recoil of nose and ball-turret guns. Smoke immediately trailed from the hit B-17s, but they held their stations.

  Here was early fighter reaction. The members of the crew sensed trouble. There was something desperate about the way those two fighters came in fast right out of their climb, without any preliminaries. Apparently, our own fighters were busy somewhere further up the procession. The interphone was active for a few seconds with brief admonitions: ‘Lead ‘em more’. … ‘Short bursts’. … ‘Don’t throw rounds away’. … ‘Bombardier to left waist gunner, don’t yell. Talk slow’.

  Three minutes later the gunners reported fighters climbing up from all round the clock, singly and in pairs, both FW-190s and ME-109s. The fighters I could see on my side looked too many for sound health. No friendly Thunderbolts were visible. From now on we were in mortal danger. My mouth dried up and my buttocks pulled together. A co-ordinated attack began, with the head-on fighters coming in from slightly above, the 9 and 3 o’clock attackers approaching from about level and the rear attackers from slightly below. The guns from every B-17 in our group and the group ahead were firing simultaneously, lashing the sky with ropes of orange tracer to match the chain-puff bursts squirting from the 20mm cannon muzzles in the wings of the Jerry single-seaters.