The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

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СКАЧАТЬ senior officers who shared the opinion of the Deputy Director of Staff Duties, Group Captain (later Air Vice-Marshal) F. H. Maynard, that navigation over long distances was a ‘comparatively simple’ exercise.⁵⁹ When changes to the navigational syllabus were proposed in 1938, this was at the behest of Coastal Command, but few of the revisions were in place by the time war broke out. As late as 1941, to provide bomber crews with an accurate target position before take-off was thought to be sufficient. But operations very quickly demonstrated that if training and equipment were lacking, such information was of little use.

      The extent of navigational error during many of these early operations is illustrated by one account of 7–8 March 1940, when Whitleys of 77 Squadron were returning from a mission over Poland. A 77 Squadron aircraft flew for 11 hours using dead-reckoning navigation before making an emergency landing in an area calculated to be near its base at Villeneuve, some 30 miles south-east of Paris. The crew was astonished to find that the language spoken by a group of farmworkers gathering around the aircraft was German. It was only then that they realised the enormity of their navigational error, and only just succeeded in restarting the Whitley’s engines as enemy troops arrived.⁶⁰ This is reminiscent of similar navigational problems faced by the RFC’s bombing crews in the First World War. For example, in December 1917, 55 Squadron lost half of its formation during one bombing operation because the crews lost their way when they were forced to navigate above cloud. Only the flight commander was able to locate the home aerodrome and land safely.⁶¹ As the official historians commented, ‘What is surprising about the years before 1942 is not that so many crews failed to find their targets, but that more of them did not fail to find England on their return.’⁶²

      Even if aircrews succeeded in locating their targets, there was no guarantee that they would be able to hit them. The early aircrews of the Second World War were reliant upon bombsights developed by the previous generation. The most common was the Course Setting Bombsight, which dated from the closing stages of the First World War, and this was only partially automatic, so that the final settings had to be done manually by the bomb-aimer in the run-up to the target. The bombsight demanded that the aircraft be kept on a straight and level approach to the target, as the slightest deviations in the air resulted in large errors on the ground, so that crews were compelled to hold their nerve if they wanted to hit a target accurately. As a consequence, aircraft fell easy prey to enemy fighters and flak, as one 10 Squadron Whitley crew found during May 1940 when they attempted to hit an oil installation at Bremen. In order to have a steady run-up to the target, the pilot made six passes over the city at less than 1,000 feet, coming under heavy fire each time. When the aircraft returned to its Yorkshire base, 700 holes were found in the fuselage.⁶³

      The real impetus to improve navigational and bomb aiming standards came with the findings of an independent report into bombing accuracy instituted by Churchill’s Scientific Adviser, Lord Cherwell. The so-called Butt report, issued in the autumn of 1941, concluded that of all the aircraft claiming to have attacked their targets, only one-third had arrived within 5 miles of them. Over the Ruhr, the proportion fell to one-tenth because of the heightened anti-aircraft defences and industrial haze obscuring targets.⁶⁴ In combination with developing Operational Research techniques, this study led to a more frank approach to operational problems experienced by aircrews. Not only was there subsequently far greater research and development into aids to navigation and bomb-aiming, which led to the introduction of radar equipment such as H2S, improved bombsights such as the Stabilised Vector Bombsight known as Mark XIV, and the specialist navigational group in Bomber Command known as the Pathfinders, but there was also a far greater understanding of the physical and psychological stresses placed on aircrew.⁶⁵

      Like so many other facets of the air war, the First World War experience cast its long shadow also in relation to attitudes towards combat stress. In the First War the prevailing view was that there was something cowardly about squadrons who lacked an offensive spirit or individuals who broke down under the strain of operations.⁶⁶ Trenchard, who was known for his advocacy of an offensive spirit, admonished one of his bombing squadrons in 1918 for having ‘naval ideas’, by which he meant the squadron was being overly cautious. The RNAS had developed a reputation for not flying if the weather conditions were considered marginal, quite sensibly, whereas the RFC, and then the RAF under Trenchard, had the ‘habit of flying whenever possible, taking risks, expecting losses, and hoping for the best’.⁶⁷ The CO of the bombing squadron concerned (which had been in the RNAS) disagreed fundamentally with Trenchard: ‘I think the question of morale in a squadron is very important and if a squadron does a great deal of work without losing any machines, it is doing as good work as a squadron which is doing slightly better work, but at a high cost of machines and personnel and consequently morale.’⁶⁸ As time went on, Trenchard’s views prevailed, and what seems to have been the wise caution exhibited by the old naval squadrons evaporated.

      After the First World War there was no attempt by the Air Ministry to examine the question of combat stress, as it was not considered an issue. Nor did the official historians of the air war devote any attention to the subject. The closest they came was a page and a half on ‘the spirit of the pilot’, in which Walter Raleigh spoke of Trenchard’s belief that the morale of the air service depended on individual pilots being positive in everything they did: ‘To think only of dangers and drawbacks, to make much of the points in which the Germans had attained a fleeting superiority, to lay stress on the imperfections of our own equipment – all this, [Trenchard] knew, was to invite defeat.’⁶⁹ There seems to have been little appreciation of the unnatural stresses placed on aircrews, or, indeed, the fighting man on the ground, during the First World War. But, for the airman, there was not even a term equating to ‘shell shock’. Evidently it was felt that aircrew during the First World War did not suffer from combat stress, and this might have arisen because aviators were removed from the horrors of the land war. The fact that men volunteered for flying duties, which, in any case, were seen as glamorous, would not have helped.

      Therefore, combat stress in the early part of the Second World War was little understood. Before May 1941 there was no conception of a limited tour of duty; aircrews continued to serve until they were killed, wounded or taken off flying operations for some specific reason. There was no organised investigation into flying stress among aircrews until the end of 1940, and the term ‘flying stress’ was not coined until the very end of that year. Flying stress was then used to describe a condition that might be observed in an aircrew member as a result of an abnormal strain being placed on an individual. Those who broke down as a result of this strain were categorised into three principal groups. The first comprised those men who were temperamentally unfit for flying duties. ‘These men are brave, and prove it by determined and unavailing effort to make good. They are overcome by fear of their environment and not by fear of the enemy.’⁷⁰ Such men, it was thought, would break down in the space of five to ten missions, and their breakdown was believed to be permanent. The second type identified was the individual with less than average capacity for sustained effort. He was described as a ‘good type’ who undertook operational flying successfully, but who had less than average capacity for sustained effort on such duties. Being less able, he was more likely to be under strain. The third category covered the man with average or better than average capacity for sustained effort, but who collapsed suddenly, usually after a period of sustained fatigue.

      In addition to these categories there were two others, which sought to explain the failings of men considered to be outside the three principal groupings. There was the ‘constitutionally unsuitable for flying duty’ type. ‘These men are not brave, and they seek to evade the danger and discomfort of operational duty through any door of escape.’⁷¹ Such men were thought to break down after one to five missions, and they were considered a ‘serious danger to morale’. The other type was called the ‘fair weather’ individual, who used as a means of escaping from operational duties an alleged dislike of a particular aircraft or environment, which he attempted to use as a justification for asking to be transferred. He, too, was described as a serious threat to morale.

      A good indication that the phenomenon of flying СКАЧАТЬ