First Jagdkorps returned with claims for 30 kills for the loss of nine aircraft and crews. Bomber Command lost 37 aircraft and six more were written off in crashes and collisions. An hour before reaching Stuttgart Lancaster F-Freddie on 57 Squadron at East Kirkby was attacked by Leutnant Herbert Koch of 11./NJG3. He set all four engines on fire and Pilot Officer Sam Atcheson DFC ordered all his crew to bail out once they had crossed into Switzerland but only one of the gunners made it before the Lancaster crashed at Saignelegier. E-Easy was one of two Lancaster IIs on 408 ‘Goose’ Squadron RCAF that were shot down with no survivors. Flying Officer Alexander Colville RCAF, 27, from Bowmanville, Ontario and his crew had taken off from Linton-on-Ouse at 19.03 hours and were lost without trace. Sergeant Michael Yorke Zisslin Kalms RAFVR, who was 19, had been in Leytonstone. The family, who were of the Jewish faith, later moved to Edgware in Middlesex after the family home was destroyed by enemy bombing. After leaving school Michael had become an engineering apprentice at de Havillands. A motorcycle enthusiast and keen boxer, he joined the RAF on 8 October 1941 aged 17 and became the flight engineer on the crew. Flying Officer Moody Siddons the bomb aimer was the oldest at 30 and was from Langford, British Columbia. Warrant Officer Arthur Hodson RCAF the WOp/AG was the same age as his pilot and was from New Westminster, BC. Sergeant Dennis Davies RAFVR the rear gunner was 21 and from Rhondda, Glamorgan.46
Homebound and flying at 20,000 feet south-west of Strasbourg Halifax D-Dog on 466 Squadron at Leconfield was attacked by Hauptmann Heinz Reschke St.III/NJG6 who set a fuel tank and some oxygen supply bottles on fire. Pilot Officer H C Wills RAAF held the blazing Halifax steady while his crew bailed out and by the time he made his own exit, the flames had burnt him about the face and hands. Upon being captured he was taken to hospital in Strasbourg for treatment. A second 466 Squadron Halifax III flown by Flight Sergeant John Cecil Bond RAAF was badly shot about by a night fighter and the Australian finally ditched 30 miles from Portland Bill. Pilot Officer Oswald Kenneth Chrimes died in the aircraft.47
X-X-Ray, a 578 Squadron Halifax III at Burn ran short of fuel on the return to the airfield bounded by the Selby canal to the north and to the east by the LNER Doncaster to Selby railway line. Soon after crossing the Kent coast the engines began to misfire. The pilot gave the order to bail out but only four complied before the bomber crashed east of Biggin Hill, killing the three remaining crew. C-Charlie crashed into brickworks at Selby. Five of the crew were killed and two were injured in the crash. S-Sugar, which was shot down by Leutnant Helmut Bunje and his Funker Unteroffizier Alfred Weimann of 4./NJG6 flying a Bf 110G-4 took the squadron’s losses on the night to three. The Abschuss was the first of Bunje’s twelve wartime victories. Flight Sergeant John Douglas Lyon and three of the crew were killed. Sergeant D J Salt was gravely wounded and would most likely have died but for three young German girls who found him lying in deep snow and insisted that he was given first aid. Salt was later repatriated aboard the Arundel Castle, reaching Liverpool on 6 February 1945.48
While returning to Waddington Lancaster E-Easy on 463 Squadron RAAF was involved in a mid-air collision with a 625 Squadron Lancaster at Kelstern, both aircraft falling near Branston, four miles SE of Lincoln. All fourteen men were killed. This also took 625 Squadron’s losses on the night to three. Q-Queenie on 425 ‘Alouette’ Squadron RCAF, out of petrol, was abandoned on the return to Tholthorpe and it crashed into houses on Adelaide Street, Brierley Hill on the northern side of Halesowen in the eastern suburbs of Birmingham. Remarkably, none of the crew was injured but three houses were demolished and three others were badly damaged and one person on the ground was killed and another injured. The 420 ‘Snowy Owl’ Squadron RCAF Halifax III flown by Sergeant W D McAdam RCAF was hit by flak, which killed Sergeant William Edmund Briggs the navigator and wounded the pilot in both legs. The starboard inner was wrecked and height was lost. Despite much pain from his injuries McAdam decided to continue the sortie. On the return flight, by which time the Halifax was down to less than 5,000 feet, the aircraft was hit by flak again but assisted by Sergeant N E Ranson, who assumed the duties of navigator, the south coast was regained and McAdam landed at Friston airfield, Sussex at 03.10 hours. Only then did he reveal to his crew that he had been wounded. 49
On the night of 16/17 March 130 aircraft – mostly Halifaxes – successfully bombed Amiens. Fifteen Lancasters on 617 Squadron and six H2Sequipped Lancasters of 106, there to drop parachute flares, carried out a precision attack on the Michelin tyre factory at Clermont-Ferrand. Though partly sabotaged and recently bombed it was still making the Germans 24,000 tyres a month. The briefing orders were to destroy three of the four large factory buildings but to leave the workers’ canteen intact. The aiming-point was first accurately marked with red spot fires. These were then overlaid with green target-indicators to emphasise the aiming-point. Six of the 617 aircraft carried 12,000lb ‘blockbusters’ and each and every one was a direct hit on the workshops, which ceased production. All the aircraft from both raids returned safely. Daylight reconnaissance by a Mosquito revealed that the workers’ canteen just beside the workshops was undamaged. That night 19 Lancasters of 5 Group, including 13 on 617 Squadron carried out an accurate raid on a former French state gunpowder factory on the banks of the River Dordogne at Bergerac 50 miles east of Bordeaux. The target was marked from 5,000 feet and the aircraft then bombed from 18,000 feet. For fifteen seconds it looked as though the sun was coming up underneath as just one great orange flash lit up the sky for miles. No bombs fell outside the works and all aircraft returned without loss. At another explosives factory at Angouleme in a bend of the Charente, 75 miles north-northeast of Bordeaux on the night of 20/21 March twenty Lancasters of 5 Group, including 14 on 617 Squadron, successfully bombed the Pouderie Nationale after Cheshire put his spot fires in the centre. Again there was no damage outside.
The Main Force was rested on 17 March and a night in Grimsby at the St. Patrick’s Day dance at the Town Hall was an opportunity not to be missed. At Binbrook on the windswept Lincolnshire Wolds (which to the Aussies on 460 Squadron RAAF were not really hills but ‘rises’) had become a familiar sight in Grimsby and Chambers’ restaurant on their days off. They were by and large a happy go lucky lot whose sense of enjoyment belied the fact that 460 had suffered the highest percentage loss in all Bomber Command Wellington squadrons and would fly the most Lancaster sorties in 1 Group and in Bomber Command, suffering the most Lancaster losses in the Group. Many men did complete their tour and it meant another party in the backroom at the ‘Marquis of Granby’ in Binbrook village where Rene Trevor sang for the boys and played the piano. The tradition was that each man who completed their tour was held aloft while he wrote his name on the ceiling of the backroom. Rene had been left to run the ‘Granby’ with the help of a staff of seven ever since her husband had been called up for the RAF and sent to the Middle East in 1940. She sewed on buttons and decorations, mended jackets and cooked meals for the young men. Sausage, two eggs and toast cost 1s 6d, or at the weekends a full Sunday roast could be had for 2s 3p. Anne, the landlady’s young daughter proved to be very popular with the Aussies and they would often ask her to sing to them. When she was three she had run through from the bar screaming ‘Mummy, mummy the Germans have arrived!’ The little girl had never heard an Australian accent before. Her pet donkey was tethered at the back of the pub and one night some of the boys got a bit tight and they took the donkey back with them to the Sergeant’s Mess and painted the animal air force blue. They brought it back next day. Quite apologetic they were too!
The bus queues to Grimsby were always an indication of whether the squadron was on ops. A lot of men in the queue for Grimsby meant a quiet night at the ‘Granby’. An empty queue meant another raid on Germany. At the St. Patrick’s Day dance Pilot Officer Reg Mullins RAAF set eyes on Pat Gowan, an officer with His Majesty’s Customs and Excise who lived with her parents in Laceby Road. The romance between the Lancaster pilot and the young girl from Grimsby wou
ld prove a testing time, for losses among bomber crews were mounting, none more so than at Binbrook where 460 would carry out the most bombing raids, fly the most sorties and suffer the most losses in Australian squadrons in Bomber Command.50
At 19.34 hours on the night of 18/19 March Reg Mullins took his Lancaster off from Binbrook for the raid on Frankfurt. He was part of a force of 846 aircraft of the Main Force; 620 of them Lancasters. Part of the Nachtjagd force was sent north when the JLOs were deceived by the appearance on radar of 98 aircraft, which were going to lay mines in the Heligoland area but another force of night fighters in Germany met the Main Force stream just before Frankfurt was reached. The Path Finders marked the target accurately and this led to heavy bombing of eastern, central and western districts of Frankfurt. Mullins bombed the city at 22.09 hours from 21,000 feet, the target being identified by TI reds and red/yellow flares covering an area two miles square. The later phases of the bombing were scattered but extensive destruction was caused in Frankfurt. On his return Mullins said ‘Promising attack, good route.’ Twenty aircraft – twelve Halifaxes and eight Lancasters – were lost and two Lancasters crashed on return.
When on 22/23 March, 816 bombers revisited Frankfurt, Reg Mullins and his crew were ‘on’ the battle Order. So too was Wing Commander Vashon James ‘Pop’ Wheeler DFC* MC* who had flown on every operation 207 Squadron at Spilsby had undertaken since he had taken command from Wing Commander P N Jennings on 26 February. Wheeler was born in 1898, had seen active service as a second lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade between 1916 and 1918 and in 1919 was part of the ill-fated British Expedition to Russia in support of Czarist forces opposing the communist revolution, for which he received the Order of St. Stanislaus. Learning to fly during the 1920s and duly becoming an airline pilot, at outbreak of war he completed a tour on Ansons and flew a further 71 combat sorties on Hurricanes, Havocs and Beaufighters on 85 Squadron and claimed two enemy aircraft destroyed in early 1941. ‘Pop’ completed a further 29 defensive patrols on 157 Squadron (which he commanded 29 December 1942–August 1943) before flying the unit’s first Intruder operation on 23 March 1943. Now, a year later, the 46-year-old was at the controls of Lancaster A-Apple for what was his 158th operational flight.
The bombers took an indirect route to the city, crossing the Dutch coast north of the Zuider Zee and then flying almost due south to Frankfurt. This and a mine-laying diversion operation by 128 Stirlings in Kiel Bay and 18 more off Denmark confused the enemy defences for a time and JLO’s believed that the main target would be Hannover. Brian Soper seemed to remember there always being a heavy concentration of searchlights at Frankfurt and this was no exception: ‘With the master beam scanning the sky, it was blinding if we caught the beam and being radar controlled, once caught, all the other beams would form one large cone and many manoeuvres would have to be adopted to escape. Meanwhile all the flak would be concentrated upon the victim. Fortunately we never got fully trapped.’
The marking and bombing were accurate and damage to Frankfurt was even more severe than a few nights previously. Almost 1,400 people perished in these two raids and 175,000 inhabitants were bombed out.51 The city diarist described these night raids and a daylight attack by the American 8th Air Force 36 hours later, as the ‘worst and most fateful blow of the war’ and one ‘which simply ended the existence of the Frankfurt, which had been built up since the Middle Ages.’52
Relief trains arrived after the raids bringing kettles of noodle soup with meat, bread and butter and sausages. Perhaps it was coincidence but Frankfurt is the birthplace of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and this raid marked the anniversary of the death of the poet, novelist and dramatist, whose greatest masterpiece was Faust, a magician and alchemist who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power.
Oberleutnant Heinz Rökker was one of only a few fighter pilots who, almost magically, found the bomber stream. This was due mainly to the strange alchemy of his radar equipment and knowledge gained from more than two years of combat. Again flying a powerful Ju 88R-2, the Experten took off from Langensalza at 20.10 hours and he picked out his first victim of the night at 21.30 hours south-east of Emmen, Holland. It was Lancaster JI-B on 514 Squadron flown by Flight Sergeant John Bernard Underwood. Using his frontal armament and attacking von hinten unten, Rökker dispatched the unfortunate Lancaster, which went down with Underwood and four of his crew lying dead in the aircraft.53 An hour later, at 22.27 hours twixt Koblenz and Limburg the Oberleutnant’s second Lancaster Abschuss followed. Finally, at 22.35 hours he claimed a Halifax at Herborn near Koblenz. It was R-Robert54 flown by Pilot Officer Dickie Atkins on 578 Squadron at Burn (which was ‘cold, wet and full of mud’). It was the final trip of their first tour. No other crew on the squadron had finished their tour, owing to the heavy losses sustained in the Battle of Berlin. Group Captain Nigel Marwood-Elton DFC, Burn’s Station Commander, flew as Atkins’ second dickey and Flight Sergeant Eric Sanderson manned the four Brownings in the rear turret. Sanderson recalls:
We had an early evening take-off. The last turning point was Hannover at about 22.00 hours and we were on the run down to Frankfurt. Night fighters were active and combats were to be seen. A little after 22.00 we were at about 20,000 feet when I saw a Ju 88 slide underneath my turret. My evasive action was always a steep diving turn to port. We lost about 3,000 feet, got back on course and I expected to have lost the Ju 88 but he was still there underneath us! We tried a corkscrew. The Ju 88 followed us through the lot and we did another diving turn. I was worried for this one was special and now I made my error for which he had been waiting! I told my pilot to bank the aircraft so that the mid-upper might shoot downwards. The fighter was still below whilst our Halifax hung there with the pilot fighting to get control of the fully loaded bomber. That was when the Ju 88 hit us in the bomb bay and in the petrol tanks on the starboard wing. Dickie Atkins ordered, ‘Parachute, Parachute, Jump, Jump!’ I opened the turret doors and pulled my chute in. My helmet, mike and oxygen were off. Now which side? Port or starboard? Most of the fire was on the starboard side and did my WOp/AG have his trailing aerial out? (Not the best thing to meet bailing out of the port side of a rear gun turret). So starboard side, a fast-roll through the flames and away! But No! My feet were caught in the turret and I was hanging half in and half out. I tried to get back in the turret to free my legs and try again but after several attempts I gave up. I now thought of pulling the ripcord but the thought of being pulled out of my legs delayed my decision. However, life with or without legs was sweet and preferable so I pulled the string. I shot out of the turret like a cork out of a bottle. I must have been only about 500 feet from the ground. The next thing my chute was fully open and I was swinging on the end of it. Looking down I saw that I was about to enter trees below. I was knocked out and must have been out for some time because when I started getting out of my parachute, Mae West and flying gear and checking if I still had my legs, I saw the burning aircraft only a few hundred yards away. Men were shouting to each other around the fire. I was unable to walk and my hands and face were burnt so evasion was out of the question and I called to them.55
Heinz Rökker landed safely back at Langendiebach at 2330 hours.56
Twenty-five Lancasters and seven Halifaxes were lost. ‘Pop’ Wheeler died at the controls of A-Apple. Three other men on the crew were killed, three surviving to be taken prisoner. A Lancaster which crashed in Suffolk on return resulted in the deaths of five of the crew.
Fifty miles north of Frankfurt the Lancaster flown by Pilot Officer Reg Mullins was attacked by a night fighter that raked the aircraft with cannon shells, and the fuselage was holed in a number of places. A shell burst against the bomb doors and for the moment the crew thought that the bombs in the bay would explode. The rear gunner was wounded and lost consciousness when the turret was shot to pieces. The main compass was destroyed, the rudder controls were severed and a small fire had started. Mullins dived the Lancaster and managed to lose the night fighter and
he tried to call up the crew but the intercom system was virtually out of action. There was no reply from the two gunners but he could just make himself heard by the others. Sergeant D H Cochrane the wireless operator went back to see what had happened to Sergeant H J Somers, the Canadian mid-upper gunner. Cochrane found Somers half out of his turret and in a stupor. His oxygen supply had been shot away. Cochrane gave him his own emergency oxygen bottle and then went back for another. In the fuselage he found a small fire, which he put out with his hands. Then he found that E Parry the rear gunner, too, was unconscious. When he returned to the mid-upper turret, Somers and his parachute were missing. The crew’s theory, discussed later, was that Somers recovered consciousness after being given the emergency oxygen supply and then, getting no answer on the intercom and seeing a large hole in the fuselage, must have believed that he was the only man left in the aircraft and bailed out, still half stupefied.57
Cochrane reported to his captain and Mullins, though he knew that his Lancaster was defenceless now if another fighter attacked, decided to go on to the target. They reached Frankfurt, dropped their bombs and turned for home, Mullins controlling the aircraft with the ailerons only. The Path Finders marked the target accurately and this led to heavy bombing but the later phases of the bombing were scattered. Over 5,400 houses were destroyed or seriously damaged and 55,000 people were bombed out. Mullins sent E Wilson the bomb aimer back to the mid-upper turret. Later Cochrane found him, too, fainting from lack of oxygen, took him back and gave him a fresh supply. He found the elevator trims had gone and that the Lancaster was tending to climb all the time. He was fast tiring with his long struggle to keep the bomber on its course. Cochrane joined him and the two used their combined strength to hold the controls as the Lancaster limped home. It became more and more difficult to handle and by the time they reached the coast, W Hendry the flight engineer also had to lend his strength to cope with the controls. Between the three of them they got the bomber down at last to a safe landing.
Bomber Command Page 35
