Air Force Blue

The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory

Patrick Bishop

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780007433162
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

1

The Big One

The faint feeling of dread that was always there in the bad old days was absent this morning. Dawn was still several hours away and inside the chilly briefing room eighteen crews from 9 Squadron were gathered to hear their orders. They smoked and chatted, waiting for the CO to arrive to reveal the location of the target. Occasionally there was a burst of laughter. Today the hilarity sounded unforced and not just a cover for jangling nerves. The date was 25 April 1945 and Germany was in its death throes. One precious thought united the 126 men present: in twelve hours’ time their war might be over and they would never have to do this again.

If so, it seemed likely they were going out with a bang. The previous evening the CO had toured the messes advising drinkers to take it easy as ‘something special’ was in the offing.1 The word from Flights was that the fuel order was for 2,154 gallons per aircraft.2 That meant an extra-long trip. And what was the BBC doing here? Next to the platform at the front of the room a reporter and technician were fiddling with microphone and disc recorder.

The large map of Europe on the wall behind the platform offered a clue. It was the first thing the crews looked at when they trooped in. The red tape that traced their route to the target ‘started at Bardney, our base, ran down to the South Coast and across the Channel,’ remembered Flight Sergeant Fred Whitfield, who, though ‘tour expired’ after completing thirty trips as a rear gunner, had volunteered to carry on.3 ‘At that point it diverted across France on a dog leg and ended up in Southern Germany.’ Whitfield’s first thought was that it ‘looked like a daylight raid on Munich’.

The orderly officer called the crews to attention and with a scraping of chairs they got to their feet as Wing Commander Bazin walked down the aisle followed by his specialist officers, stepped onto the dais and began the briefing.

Jim Bazin, DFC and bar, seemed indestructible. Born in Imperial India, raised in a comfortable middle-class family in the North East of Britain, he served as a part-timer in an RAF auxiliary squadron for four years before the war and fought from the first day to what was now surely almost the last. By any reckoning of the odds he should have been dead several times over. Whatever terrors he had experienced had left no outward mark on him. When he spoke, it was in a cultured, amused accent, more like a university professor than a warrior.

‘Well, Gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘This is the big one.’4 He explained that at this late stage in the war they were being given a chance to land a blow on the man who had started it all. They were off to bomb Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. ‘Your particular aiming point for this attack is the house where this gentleman is supposed to live,’ he told them. ‘Whether he’s there is another matter.’ He paused for a second before going on. ‘But no doubt there will be plenty of people there to benefit from it.’5 The room rocked with laughter.

They settled down as the met, navigation and intelligence officers delivered the weather forecast and took them through the technicalities of route, plan of attack and expected opposition. When they finally filed out into the Lincolnshire night, heavy with the muddy smell of the surrounding fields, everyone was talking excitedly. They had all heard of Berchtesgaden, of course. To the older ones who remembered it from pre-war newsreels, it brought back memories of Chamberlain and Munich and national humiliation. For the younger airmen it was a name from the news bulletins, one of the three main military headquarters from which Hitler directed his forces. None of those who planned Bomber Command operations had seen fit to attack it before. Now, for reasons that no one explained in the briefing, the time had finally come.

The sky was clear and the moon, one day away from fullness, silvered the ridges of the potato fields surrounding the base. The aerodrome stood just north of the village of Bardney on the plain which stretches north from the Lincolnshire fenlands to the rising hills of the Wolds. It was one of more than a hundred bomber stations built during the early years of the war, a standard pattern of three concrete runways and three hangars, interspersed with utilitarian huts and sheds where the airmen, ground crews and WAAFs ate, washed and slept.6

There were two hours to take-off and much to be done beforehand. Operations boiled down to a succession of routines which had to be followed to the letter if you wanted to succeed and survive. But first they would eat, a meal that had long ago become a cliché: bacon and eggs and wodges of bread and margarine, washed down with American canned orange juice and mahogany-coloured tea.

They cleared their plates and headed for the crew room to climb into multi-layered flying gear and pick up their parachutes. For those who needed it there was a detour to the latrines to empty their bowels before they all climbed into canvas-covered four-ton lorries that trundled them out to dispersal where the bombers loomed, casting long moon shadows on the tarmac. The ground crew had been there for hours, refuelling, bombing up, checking the control surfaces and undercarriage, fussing over the machine as if it was their own lives that were at stake.

Those flying were swaddled like Michelin men but it still felt cold. The metal tube of the fuselage carried its own special chill. They climbed the five rungs of the ladder, through the hatch behind the gun turret amidships, and struggled to their posts. Pilot, flight engineer, navigator, bomb aimer and wireless operator wriggled forward to the nose, clambering over the thick spar that pinned together the bomber’s 102-foot wingspan. The gunners settled into their solitary nests behind them.

Each man began to run through the litany of checks and drills, second nature now from years of training and practice. For the gunners it took a few minutes. For the pilot and flight engineer it was more like half an hour. Then the pilot shouted down to the ground crew that he was ‘ready for starting’. A mechanic jumped forward to work the Ki-Gas pump and prime the carburettor of the first engine. Someone swung a white torch to indicate which engine to fire up first. From his seat, squeezed in next to the pilot, the flight engineer flipped on booster coil and main ignition switches and opened the master fuel cock. The pilot thumbed the starter button and with an explosive thud and a volley of flame and smoke, one by one the Merlin engines burst into life, filling the rural silence with a deep-throated roar. In the farms and villages around the bomber bases the noise was now as familiar as birdsong.

More minutes passed before the dials showed every engine had reached the right temperature and pressure. It was a laborious business but there was no rushing it. The machine was what got you there and got you home. This day of all days, with the finishing line in sight, was no time to get careless.

A-Able was the first away. It was 5 a.m. and still pitch-black but the clear sky promised a fine day. The Lancaster moved off jerkily, stopping and starting as the pilot tested the flaps and brakes. It rolled onto the runway, waiting for the signal on the Aldis lamp mounted on the control van to flash from red to green. Lining the tarmac were the usual party of WAAFs and ground staff gathered to wave and smile and pray for a safe return. This morning there were others present. Standing among them were the BBC reporter and soundman who had been at the briefing. That evening the journalist’s report, delivered in a bright, modern voice, very different from the plummy tones of the pre-war Corporation, would go out on the evening news:

‘Hallo BBC. This is Brian Bliss with Bomber Command. It’s Zero Hour, the attack is on and the first Lancaster’s swinging into position at the head of the runway right opposite me now … here she comes … remember this is the squadron which sank the Tirpitz and now they’re off to Berchtesgaden with twelve thousand pounders. Twelve thousand pounders! And they’re taking the attack literally to Hitler’s doorstep!’7 Millions of listeners heard the engine note rising sharply as the revs climbed, then fading as Bliss, almost shouting now, announced that ‘A-Able is off … a marvellous sight as she races by!’

In Q-Queenie, rear gunner Fred Whitfield sat in his turret and waited with the rest of the crew for their turn. After thirty operations together they knew each other as well as they did their own families. They were ordinary men from all over Britain. The pilot, Ron Adams, came from Wembley, London, Larry Brown the flight engineer was from Leeds, bomb aimer Phil Jackson from Nottingham, navigator Jim Lynam from Scunthorpe, wireless operator Jack Faucheux from Romford and the mid-upper gunner Frank Stebbings from Tunbridge Wells. Fred Whitfield was a Geordie, born in South Shields.

Starting operations in the aftermath of D-Day, they had bombed V weapons sites, marshalling yards, bridges and U-boat pens, before resuming the assault on German cities. They had been shot up by a night fighter and only made it home thanks to the skill and determination of ‘Lucky’ Adams who, though only twenty-one, was in Whitfield’s eyes ‘the best pilot in the RAF’. The gunners gave as good as they got. Whitfield and Stebbings had several kills to their credit, and the crew’s ‘press-on’ spirit had earned them four Distinguished Flying Medals and one Distinguished Service Cross between them. It had needed courage, skill and the closest teamwork to come through these trials and their faith in each other was strong. The raid they were about to embark on seemed less hazardous than most. But everyone knew of a crew that had bought it on their last mission. While he waited Whitfield ‘closed my eyes for a couple of minutes and had a few words with my God’.8

Then Q-Queenie was shuddering with the pent-up kinetic energy of four Merlin engines as Ron Adams jammed on the brakes and opened the throttle to maximum revs. He eased off and the Lancaster bounded forward. At about 50 knots (57mph) Whitfield ‘felt the turret lift as the tail wheel left the ground. “90 knots, 100 knots, 120 knots,” said the engineer, reading the speed. The skipper eased back on the control column. Queenie was airborne. We climbed, slowly gaining height.’

Once all aircraft were at 10,000 feet they formed a loose gaggle, and set course for Cap Gris Nez near their rendezvous with the squadron with whom they would be spearheading the raid. 617 Squadron were friends and rivals and their base was only a few miles from Bardney at Woodhall Spa. The two operated together often, specializing in missions requiring great skill and accuracy, and as Brian Bliss reminded his listeners six months before had finished off Hitler’s last remaining battleship with a volley of ‘earthquake’ bombs as she lay crippled in Tromsø fjord. The exploit had added extra lustre to the reputation of 617, already famous as the Dam Busters. However, as their sister squadron liked to point out, they were relative sprogs in the bombing game, having been created only two years earlier, whereas 9 Squadron dated back to 1914 and had been in continuous action from the very start of the war.

The sister squadrons made up just a small part of a huge force bearing down on Berchtesgaden. The pre-dawn sky of eastern England was thick with aircraft heading in the same direction. Three hundred and fifty-nine bombers were being thrown into the attack. Guiding them were sixteen Mosquitoes from Path Finder Force, equipped with special navigation aids to fix the target, tucked, safely until now, in the folds of the Bavarian Alps. Only five years before, an armada of this size was a distant fantasy. Yet this was not even the biggest raid of the day. An even larger formation was heading off to the North Sea island of Wangerooge, to smash up shore batteries that menaced Allied shipping delivering supplies to the port of Bremen for the armies encircling Berlin.

The RAF of April 1945 bore little resemblance to the organization Jim Bazin had joined eleven years before. In that time it had expanded enormously, evolving from a tight, professional elite drawn mainly from the top layers of society into a vast structure, more than a million strong. It had long ceased to be an overwhelmingly British enterprise. Scattered among the squadrons today were Poles, Australians, New Zealanders, Rhodesians, Americans, Canadians, Frenchmen and Dutchmen, Norwegians and Danes, only some of the sixty nationalities which had found a home in the Air Force.

The spirit of amateurism that still flickered in the pre-war service had long ago been snuffed out by the demands of war and replaced by a ruthless professionalism. Five years and eight months before, 9 Squadron had taken part in the first proper British air raid of the war. On 4 September 1939, together with 149 Squadron, they flew in appalling weather across the North Sea to attack German warships lying near Brunsbüttel. They had only dead reckoning to get them there and their twin-engine Wellingtons were loaded with primitive bombs. Against great odds, most of the raiders managed to find the target area but it was covered with cloud and fiercely defended by flak and fighters. Only one crew claimed to have hit anything. Two 9 Squadron aircraft were brought down and all ten on board killed. There would be hundreds of other futile sorties before the RAF began to function efficiently as a war machine. Now the process was complete. The days of wasted effort and useless sacrifice were long gone and the British and American air forces enjoyed almost total mastery of the skies of Europe.

The shoals of Lancasters cruised on, dark and ominous in the moonlight, pausing to circle at their rendezvous point above the towns of Arras, Valenciennes and Laon near the Franco-Belgian border. Then, with 9 Squadron and 617 Squadron in the lead, they set off south and east towards the Alps and Berchtesgaden.

The crews had been given their specific targets at early morning briefings at nineteen bases spread over the bomber counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Norfolk. The lead squadrons had the most difficult task. Their objectives were, as Bazin warned his men, ‘very, very small indeed’9 and hidden in the pine-covered clefts of a tall mountain range. The first was the Eagle’s Nest, a spectacular pavilion, built for Hitler as a retreat and diplomatic reception centre on top of a rocky spur called the Kehlstein, 6,000 feet above sea level. The second was Hitler’s house, the Berghof, which sat, five miles down the mountain, on the shoulder of the humped ridge known as the Obersalzberg. The surrounding area was enclosed by fences and guard posts. Inside the security zone some of the leading figures of Hitler’s court – Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann and Albert Speer – had built villas and the rock beneath it was honeycombed with bomb shelters and storerooms. The complex also housed a communications centre from where Hitler could keep in touch with his commanders.

The chances of a direct hit on either target were slight. With the armament 9 and 617 Squadrons were carrying, however, perfect accuracy was not essential. At the start of the war the biggest weapon in the RAF’s armoury was the 500lb General Purpose bomb. It contained more metal than explosive and many of those produced were duds. Today the thirty-two aircraft of the lead squadrons were carrying 12,000lb ‘Tallboys’, aerodynamically optimized dart-like missiles devised by the engineering genius Barnes Wallis that plunged deep into the ground before exploding, creating an earthquake effect that devastated everything around.

Behind them came a stream of bombers from the Main Force, the workaday squadrons which had spent the last three years smashing Germany’s cities, causing and suffering appalling casualties. They would attack in two waves. Their main objective was the most prominent feature on the Obersalzberg, the barracks which housed the SS troops who guarded Hitler and his entourage.

Was he there or wasn’t he? It seemed unlikely, but it was left to squadron commanders to raise or lower the expectations of their men as they saw fit. Bazin had chosen to play down the possibility. Others decided it would be enjoyable to hint that Hitler might well be at home. Either way, this was an operation most were proud to be part of, something to tell the grandchildren they were beginning to allow themselves to believe they might one day have.

The Dam Busters were led by Squadron Leader John Brookes, who was also in overall charge of the operation. The honour should have gone to their CO, Wing Commander Johnny Fauquier but he had been told by his superiors that he had exceeded his permitted number of operations and would not be on the trip. The blunt-spoken Canadian did not bother to hide his annoyance when he spoke to Brookes at the briefing. ‘I’d like to have this target in my log book,’ he told him. ‘In fact I would like to have this target tattooed on my arse, but you have got to lead it.’10

The route took the bombers southwards towards Paris. There they turned again, south and east cruising at a steady 145 knots and ninety minutes later saw the snow glowing pink as the sun broke over the ramparts of the Swiss Alps.

At points along the way they were joined by more than two hundred Mustangs from RAF Fighter Command and the US Eighth Air Force. For most of the war the bombers had gone forth alone with only their on-board guns to protect them from flak and fighters. Now long-range escorts shepherded Allied bombers to and from their raids...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Prologue: Firstway
• 1 The Big One
• 2 A Cottage or a Castle?
• 3 Smoke and Mirrors
• 4 Brylcreem Boys
• 5 ‘There’s Something in the Air’
• 6 ‘Tragic, Criminally Tragic’
• 7 The Battle
• 8 Fighting the Night
• 9 Ten Million Miles of Sea
• 10 The Blue
• 11 ‘Eat, Drink and Be Merry …’
• 12 ‘Britain’s Best Advertisement’
• 13 Out of Sight
• 14 Black and White
• 15 The Hyacinths of Spring
• Epilogue: Brothers and Sisters
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Picture Section
• Index
• Also by Patrick Bishop
• About the Author
• About the Publisher