Bomber Command

by Martin Bowman

  James Campbell on 158 Squadron wrote:

  The fighter flares floated down when eight minutes from the city. They burst in brilliant pools of light on each side of the bomber stream. And they burned lazily as they lit up the broad avenue to Berlin. As first they drifted in strings of twos and threes. Then rapidly they fell, wiping away the cover of darkness shielding the bombers. The first combats were on. An orange glow splashed the darkness below and I caught the fiery outline of a Lancaster plunging earthwards, tracer streaming from her rear turret.

  Campbell pulled off his leather gauntlets and dragged a pair of newly washed white silk gloves from his pocket. He thrust his hands into them and screwed and twisted the silk until his fingers fitted smoothly into the sockets. The heavy flying gloves were too bulky for him to feel sensitively in the blacked-out nose for the delicate switches on the bomb panel. Campbell later wrote:

  White gloves brought to his mind the executioners of old, masked men in hooded headgear, bending slightly as they leaned on their axes. He smiled into his oxygen mask and looked out of the transparent nose. The smile died on his lips. A searchlight flashed on, dead, straight and blinding. As rapidly as it appeared it went out. Suddenly, it was there again, slowly toppling backwards as if pointing their course to the fighters hurtling through the night to the defence of Berlin. Within seconds the darkness was pierced by hundreds of other groping beams. Must have been one of the master searchlights.

  Another batch of flares burst above and ahead. Specially converted Ju 88s were, beyond any doubt, flying along the bomber’s track, releasing them at timed intervals, making it easier for the fighters to select their ‘kills’. The flares threw the black floating puffs left by the spent AA shells into sharp terrifying relief.

  Campbell was grateful that he could not hear the mass thunder of the barrage below, above the roar of the bomber’s four engines. The spine-tingling crump of the shells as they burst uncomfortably close spewing out their shrapnel jarred his tensed nerves.

  ‘The petrified sky was getting brighter’. Campbell looked up sharply and saw the dim silhouette of a Halifax, below his port quarter, ‘suck in long lines of tracer and burst into a rich deep glow’.

  The exploding bomber cart-wheeled slowly and illuminated a Lancaster on its starboard bow. The Lancaster pilot corkscrewed violently away from the stricken bomber, to be caught relentlessly by a searchlight. Bombers were exploding ahead, below and on each side, sky-writing their death trails in spirals of black smoke. The red target indicators sailed down, plump in the middle of the forest of searchlights, trailing through the flak in a leisurely fall of fiery bells of colour. They splashed lazily over the ground, beckoning impatiently to the armada above, gurgling voraciously as they waited to receive the bombs. After them came the secondary markers, equally vivid clusters of bewitching greens. The bomb aimer pressed the bomb release button as the red TIs crawled over the cross hilt in the graticule sight. ‘Bombs Gone!’ At the same time his right hand flicked down the four switches controlling the bomb stations he had purposely left unselected. Then he shot across the jettison bars. That lot should fall clear of the markers to burst, he hoped, in the suburbs.6

  The Path Finders were unable to identify the centre of the city by H2S and had marked an area in the southern outskirts of the city. The Main Force arrived late and many bombers cut a corner and approached from the south-west instead of using the planned south-south-east approach. This resulted in more bombs falling in the sparsely populated southern suburbs of Berlin and in open country than would otherwise have been the case, and 25 villages reported bombs. Even so, it was the Big City’s most serious bombing raid of the war so far with a wide range of industrial, housing and public properties being hit and over 2,600 individual buildings destroyed or seriously damaged.7

  Flight Sergeant Gil Marsh’s Stirling on 622 Squadron at Mildenhall was coned in searchlights over Berlin and a Wild Boar night fighter homed in. A cannon shell exploded in the cockpit, tearing a hole in Marsh’s thigh and cutting his sciatic nerve. He managed to evade the fighter by diving steeply but the hydraulics to the rear gun turret was cut and one engine was on fire. Pain, loss of blood and bouts of unconsciousness affected the pilot but the aircraft was kept under control by the navigator and the bomb aimer. Eventually, Marsh had to be removed from his seat and the Canadian bomb aimer, Sergeant John Bailey, flew the Stirling back to Mildenhall where he landed it safely. He was helped by the fact that he had nearly completed pilot training before being transferred to bomb aiming duties. He was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal and immediate commission for his actions.8

  Sergeant Ron James continues:

  The homeward course took us once more over the Baltic Sea and on our starboard side we could see the Swedish coast. ‘This is the pilot to crew – we have a problem’ (an understatement if ever there was one). ‘There is no way we can tell how much fuel we have left and it seems unlikely that we are going to make it all the way home. We have two alternatives: bail out over Sweden or go as far as we can; send out a “Mayday” and take to the dinghy.’ Bill asked us for our opinion on which course to take, and I said, ‘With all the damage to the wings, I think that it is probable that the dinghy will be u/s. Frankly, I’m for Sweden, it’s a neutral country and as we know, it is easy to get back to the UK from there.’ Two other members agreed with me but three others were willing to take a chance. Then Bill with the casting vote said, ‘Let’s press on.’ I do not think we had any choice. I am sure Bill had already decided his course of action; he was just sounding us out. Somehow we limped – I think that would be the right word – across the North Sea; very lucky indeed not to have received the attentions of the enemy. By waiting until the engines cut and then quickly switching from one wing tank to another, we had almost made it! A ‘Mayday’ call was sent out and an answering message told us to return to base. We replied that our fuel was almost exhausted and we would not make it. We tried again but still the same answer. It was now up to us. Why we had not been given another ’drome near the coast to make a diversion was a mystery to us.

  Bill was now convinced that at any moment we would drop out of the sky. All fuel tanks had been drained dry and there was no telling of how much was left in the last tank. ‘Crew – stand by! We have just crossed the coast and in a few minutes I am going to head Roger back out to sea but I will give you time to make your jump.’ As if on cue, a row of lights appeared below us illuminating a runway. ‘Hold tight lads – take crash positions – I’m going in.’ Almost before we had time to reach our stations we were landing. We touched a small hill on the way in and slithered to a stop at the end of the airfield. A second miracle happened that night; despite all the fuel loose inside the aircraft we did not blow up. Our Guardian Angel must have been looking after us, for even one spark in the right place would have seen our early demise. The next thing we knew was that many helping hands were assisting us to vacate the aircraft. Mitch was unconscious and I was very dazed and in no position to help him or myself for that matter. We had landed at Bodney, Norfolk; only taken over that day by a Thunderbolt squadron of the 352nd Fighter Group USAAF. It was only through the initiative of a private first-class that we had been able to put down at all. At the time he had been in the control tower looking around when he had heard our distress call. Not knowing the lighting system, he had started throwing switches and succeeded in illuminating the runway with one line of lights. For our Skipper Bill there was another surprise in store for the first man he saw was one of his best friends from back home in Canada. This friend was now a fighter pilot serving with the American forces.9

  The raid on Berlin was only partially successful but casualties were heavy considering the relatively inaccurate bombing: 854 people were killed and 83 more civilians were listed as missing. Many deaths were caused by an unusually high proportion of people not having sought shelter in their allocated air-raid shelters as they were ordered to do. When Doktor Goebbels, who as well as being Minister of Prop
aganda was also Berlin’s Gauleiter, received the report on the number of killed outside the shelters, he ‘nearly went nuts’. Over 2,600 buildings, most of them houses, were destroyed or seriously damaged. Bomber Command too had suffered its greatest loss of aircraft in one night in the war so far. The flak and night fighter defences were extremely fierce and 63 aircraft, 27 of them Halifaxes, were lost or written off. Seventeen Lancasters and 16 Stirlings made up the rest of the losses. At Downham Market three Stirlings were lost. Squadron Leader Waldo Harry Bentley Hiles DSO DFC on 623 Squadron and two others on 218 Squadron failed to return. Hiles had completed two tours on 218 Squadron before being posted as a staff officer to 3 Group HQ. All the crew including the rear gunner, Flight Sergeant Desmond Michael De Silva DFM who was from British Guiana and who had volunteered to join his former Skipper, were killed. Chedburgh lost two Stirlings. One was X-X-Ray on 620 Squadron flown by Sergeant George MacDonald, a former Glasgow policeman, which was shot down by a Ju 88. The regular rear gunner was sick with flu and was replaced by a gunner straight from training school who froze when the night fighter attacked. He was killed by a cannon shell. MacDonald told the crew, ‘For Christsakes get out!’ Flying Officer E Walker the bomb aimer and Flying Officer J D Sutton the navigator got out just as the port wing dropped off. Squadron Leader A P Philipsen who was on an acclimatisation flight with the crew was the only other survivor.

  M-Mother, the Stirling flown by Pilot Officer Ray Hartwell on 214 Squadron went down after attacks by a night fighter and all seven crew were taken prisoner. At Lakenheath no word was received from four Stirlings on 149 and 199 Squadrons. At Mepal, 75 Squadron were missing three Stirlings. At Wratting Common two Stirlings on 90 Squadron were lost and at Mildenhall two Stirlings were lost, with all the crew dead. The loss of the 16 Stirlings was a 12.9 per cent loss rate, which compared to 5.1 per cent for the Lancasters and 9.2 per cent for the Halifaxes.

  Halifax Q-Queenie on 76 Squadron crashed at Holme on Spalding Moor on the return. Pilot Officer W E Elder RNZAF and one crew member was injured. Wilkie Wanless, who was now a pilot officer, and the four others on the crew, walked away unharmed. It was the second time that Elder and Wanless had survived a crash landing. Elder was uninjured on the night of 27/28 July when he crashed at Shipdham in Norfolk returning from the raid on Hamburg. When W-William had crashed at Manston on the night of 14/15 April returning from Stuttgart, Wilkie Wanless’ pilot, Sergeant Michael Frederick Weir, had died of his injuries later. Four Halifax IIs on 35 Squadron that were lost included R-Robert piloted by Flight Lieutenant Harry Webster DFC, which carried Group Captain Basil Vernon Robinson DSO DFC* AFC who was now the Graveley Station Commander All eight men were killed. Nineteen Lancasters also were lost. Probably the first to go down was S-Sugar, a 7 Squadron Blind Marker aircraft flown by Squadron Leader Charles J Lofthouse OBE DFC, which carried the Oakington Station Commander, Group Captain A H Willetts DSO. Sugar was shot down by a night fighter near Oranienburg. Lofthouse, one arm broken, came down in a tree near a hut used by a Concentration Camp outside working party. He was taken prisoner immediately. All seven other men on S-Sugar were soon captured. C-Charlie on 100 Squadron had crashed on take-off from Grimsby and four more of the squadron’s Lancasters were lost on the operation. X-X-Ray on 97 Squadron at Bourn was shot down near Döberitz. Near Shouldham on the return over Norfolk, Q-Queenie, flown by Sergeant Cliff Chatten was attacked by Oberleutnant Wilhelm Schmitter, Staffelkapitän of 15./KG2 flying a Me 410A-1 Intruder. Unnoticed by the crew of the Lancaster, Schmitter closed in on his target and his Bordfunker opened fire with the twin 13mm remotely controlled MG 131 guns fitted in the fuselage barbettes and controlled from the cockpit. Shells exploded in the Lancaster’s fuselage and starboard wing. Flight Sergeant John Robert Kraemer RAAF the mid-upper gunner was killed and Chatten was wounded in his legs and chest. He ordered the rest of the crew to bail out and left it late to get out. As he came down in his parachute he was injured when the Lancaster exploded below him. After this experience three of the crew refused to fly again but Chatten, a confirmed teetotaller, recovered to fly a full tour of operations. Just four minutes after his attack on Chatten’s Lancaster, Schmitter dropped eight bombs on an airfield west of Cambridge and headed for base at Soesterberg in Holland. Eight kilometres off Zeebrugge, Belgium Schmitter’s Me 410 became the target for a RAF night fighter and was so damaged in its fuselage and one of the engines that he and his Bordfunker, Oberfeldwebel Heinz Gräber were forced to bail out into the sea. Gräber was unlucky and hit the 410’s tail as he jumped clear, breaking both his legs. Exhausted and unable to climb into their dinghies, the two men fired flares into the sky and they were fortunate that a flak post at Zeebrugge spotted them. Schmitter and Gräber were picked up by a rescue boat from the Marine Untergruppe Zeebrugge one and a half hours later.10

  Sixteen Stirlings failed to return from Berlin. L-Leather, a 90 Squadron Stirling III piloted by Sergeant Frank W Mulvey, a big Canadian, crashed in the North Sea north-west of Cuxhaven and went down ‘like a steamroller’ with four of the crew. The wireless operator continued to send out distress signals and was probably killed when he was thrown against his set as they hit the sea. The mid-upper gunner was thrown through the door of the wooden bulkhead and right up the fuselage. The bomb aimer was stood behind the pilot’s seat trying to help and he died also. Mulvey, who was concussed had managed to scramble out while the cockpit was under water and had come up from below. Sergeant J Burland the flight engineer and Sergeant J A Pighills the tail gunner got him into the dinghy. Mulvey recovered from his concussion and when the dinghy got toppled over during a storm he turned it over again by brute strength. They were rescued after precisely 7 days, 16 hours and 10 minutes adrift after being spotted by Ju 52s with degaussing rings for clearing minefields. A boat took them to Cuxhaven where they recovered fast on ‘a copious provision of lemon barley water’ and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp.11

  Five Halifax IIs on 78 Squadron failed to make it back to Breighton. C-Charlie piloted by Flying Officer John Austin was very badly shot about by night fighters and he tried gallantly to reach Breighton but the Halifax crashed into the North Sea. Austin and two of the crew were killed. As the Halifax sank, an empty fuel tank broke free, onto which Sergeant G E Russell the rear gunner helped his three injured colleagues. In the sixteen hours before help arrived one of the men fell into the sea and drowned, and the two others died from their injuries soon after being taken aboard the ASR launch. Russell was awarded a DFM for his brave attempt to save his fellow crew members.

  K-King and E-Easy were instructed to divert to Leconfield. While circling this aerodrome in readiness for landing a collision occurred and both aircraft were destroyed. Sergeant John Greet the mid-upper gunner on E-Easy was the only man to survive the collision. He woke up two weeks later in Beverley Hospital, suffering from fractures to the base of his skull and right femur. So serious were these injuries that almost five years were to elapse before he was fully recovered.12

  Another five missing Halifaxes were on 158 Squadron at Lissett. Pilot Officer H B Frisby RAAF, the pilot of C-Charlie, bailed out safely and he and five other members of his crew who also survived, were taken prisoner. (Later, in Stalag Luft III at Sagan, Frisby earned a reputation as a very skilful forger and map maker and his efforts were rewarded when, in March 1944, his fake identity cards and maps were used by the escapers after the Great Escape). Following the loss of K-King Flying Officer F A Unwin and five of his crew survived and they were captured.

  A-Apple flown by Sergeant Tom Edwards crashed near Döberitz where the pilot’s body and two of his crew were recovered from the wreckage. Four other men who had bailed out were rounded up and taken into captivity. A fourth Halifax was lost when E-Easy piloted by Flight Sergeant William Arnold ‘Bill’ Burgum RAAF was attacked just north of Berlin by Oberleutnant Rudolf ‘Rudi’ Altendorf of 2./NJG4. Burgum, whose crew had flown their first op on the Peenemünde raid, turned and flew south to what looked lik
e an open field but it was a swamp and the Halifax crashed into it after part of the wing broke off on the approach. All seven crew were killed in the crash.

  For six operations 21-year-old Flight Lieutenant Harold Kevin Hornibrook RAAF, who was from Brisbane and a pilot on 158 Squadron, had managed to evade enemy night fighters and escape the searchlights, but over Berlin he was a sitting duck. Despite his repeated corkscrewing the searchlights held L-Leather in their grip and then a night fighter pounced, firing a fusillade of incendiary shells into the Halifax until ten fires were burning fiercely. Flight Sergeant Graham Albert George McLeod RAAF the rear gunner was killed and Sergeant L G Chesson the mid-upper gunner was gravely injured. Three crew members bailed out in quick order leaving just Hornibrook and Pilot Officer Alan E Bryett, the 21-year-old bomb aimer, alone in the aircraft, which was now rapidly spiralling down from 20,000 feet. Bryett had taken the precaution of putting his parachute on and he got to the escape hatch but he could not get it open. It was jammed. Hornibrook came down from his controls, got the escape hatch opened and pushed Bryett out saying, ‘I’m coming.’ Once out of the burning Halifax Bryett pulled his D-ring and his parachute opened and he landed in something soft, which seemed like bushes. He was still blinded by the searchlights. When his sight returned after about twenty minutes, to his horror he discovered that he was in a forest about 80 feet up a tree and the Halifax had crashed nearby. Eventually, Bryett, who was badly covered in blood, got down to the ground with some difficulty. Kevin Hornibrook had saved the bomb aimer’s life, probably at the cost of his own.

  The pilot couldn’t get out, he couldn’t pull his parachute and he couldn’t save his life and he gave his life for me. It’s something I think about every day. The whole of the last sixty years is through him, in that one moment of time, when he did what all captains of aircraft would do. He saved his crew but he lost his own life.13