Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland

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СКАЧАТЬ back. The following morning, Wing Commander Pattison offered him some compassionate leave – everyone knew how close the twins had been – but Bill turned the offer down. The CO accepted his decision, but insisted on accompanying him on a twenty-minute flight to see how he was holding up. All right it seemed – but even so, Pattison did not send the crew out again for a fortnight.

      His crew did their best to help him, but it was difficult. ‘There was little I could say,’ said Dick Meredith, who moved into George’s old bed to keep Bill company. ‘We did do a bit of praying back then, and secretly I couldn’t help thinking that the Lord could not possibly be cruel enough to take both George and Bill. I thought Bill had to come through, and that gave me a sense of reassurance really. It was probably the wrong thing to think, but I couldn’t help it.’

      Somehow, Bill kept going. On 18 November, they were on another mission, this time part of a raid on Mannheim. Strong winds of over a hundred knots pushed them way off course and so they hit Frankfurt instead. The following night, unusually, they were out again, this time to Leverkusen. ‘I think that if I had stopped I might have broke down,’ Bill told me. He also wanted to be there in case any news did come through. There was a chance George and his crew had been made prisoners of war – lots of them had, and it usually took about four to six weeks for word of POWs to filter through to the Red Cross. Six weeks came and went, but still Bill refused to give up all hope.

      The rest of the crew never mentioned it. Some had lost good friends. Everyone lost someone. The statistics of the Allied bomber offensive are chilling: just over 110,000 men flew with the RAF’s Bomber Command; 55,000, almost exactly half, lost their lives. The US Eighth Air Force, joining the battle in 1942, lost 26,000 young men. Over 15,000 Allied bombers never came back – a staggering number, and a figure that equates to three-quarters of the numbers of Spitfires that were ever made. That Bill survived and George did not was simply conforming to the law of averages. ‘I don’t know what makes you press on,’ Bill sighed, ‘but you just do. There’s something in us … you know it’s crazy, but you still do it. It’s life itself. You know it’s dumb and stupid but you press on.’

      By the end of November, the Battle of Berlin had begun. Bill’s fifth mission was what was labelled the ‘the first thousand-bomber raid’ on the German capital. In fact, only 764 aircraft took part, but the British press was happy to help with the propaganda. With the enemy capital deep in Germany, they could only get there by adding auxiliary fuel tanks at the expense of some of their bomb load. When they finally arrived, after nearly four hours in the air, Berlin was covered. The flak was intense, but despite the poor visibility, they could just about make out the red target indicator markers and the thousands of explosions pulsing orange and crimson through the cloud.

      The bitingly cold winter and endless cloud and rain did not help Bill’s sense of gloom. ‘Boy, it was cold,’ he said. It was early in the New Year that he took his crew out on a flight above the clouds, just so they could see some sunlight.

      And he also tried to keep his days busy, and to keep his mind on the job in hand. Routine helped. He’d be out of bed some time around seven or eight in the morning, then he’d shower, get dressed and head over to the mess for a breakfast of porridge and perhaps some toast. Then he would wander over to the Flight Room, where he would chat and wait with the rest of the crews, wondering whether they’d be sent out on a ‘war’ that night. There could be days without a mission, but they still made sure they looked at the daily routine orders. They might have to take their aircraft to the maintenance hangars or any number of tasks. After he was commissioned in December 1943, Bill ran the station post office for a while. ‘I didn’t know a damn thing about it,’ he said, ‘and it was in a hell of a mess when I took it over.’ It was another thing that kept his mind busy.

      But he was rarely leaving the base. Just before Christmas, he decided it was time he tried to get out a bit, and so with a few of the others, went to a dance at the Catholic Hall in Northallerton. It was there that he first saw Lil.

      Lil had been listening on and off to our conversation, sometimes sitting down with us in the lounge, sometimes attending to something in the adjoining kitchen. She now brought through some tea. ‘Tea,’ said Bill, his face brightening. ‘We always drink plenty of tea here!’ Then he got up and disappeared – he had some pictures and other bits and pieces to show me, but had to dig them out from the study next door. I asked Lil about this first meeting. ‘It wasn’t that night. He saw me, but I didn’t see him. I remember it was so crowded you could hardly move,’ she told me. She’d been taken by a young sailor friend and they began dancing. ‘But he was all over me and I thought, “This is no good,” so we left.’

      Soon after, Bill was back, jiggling his leg up and down and sipping his tea, so I asked him about his side of the story. He grinned. ‘She walked in with her head held high,’ Bill said, ‘and she had nice long blonde hair.’ He immediately decided he had to dance with her, but he couldn’t reach her – by the time he got to her side of the dance-floor, she was gone. Still, it gave him an incentive to go again, and sure enough, a couple of weeks later she was there once more – and this time there was no sign of the sailor. Plucking up his courage, he went over to her and asked her to dance.

      Afterwards, he walked her home. She, too, had lost a brother – a Flight Engineer and also on bombers – and in the weeks that followed, they began to see more and more of each other. Every fifth week, the crew would be given seven days’ leave. Some went to London, while others, like Bill Morison, would play golf, sometimes at Ferndown near Bournemouth, sometimes even at St Andrews, in Scotland. Bill, however, spent his leave with Lil, at her parents’ house in Northallerton. Then, in the spring, he asked her to marry him, although he told her they should wait until after he had finished his combat tour. ‘We were losing a lot of guys,’ said Bill, ‘and I was still operational.’ Did Lil worry about Bill? ‘No,’ she said quite firmly. ‘You have faith. It was a way of life; you took one thing at a time.’

      Bill was also extremely lucky to have the crew he had. Crews tended to find each other on arrival at their Operational Training Units. There had been five of them at first, then at Croft, when they converted to four-engined bombers, two more had joined them. The same seven men had stayed together ever since. Close friends on the ground, they discovered a perfect working relationship that depended on mutual respect and complete trust. ‘All of them were brilliant,’ Bill admitted. Once the war was over, they all kept in touch, despite going their separate ways. The sense of camaraderie they had felt had been intense. Bill freely admits they were the closest friendships he ever made. Sixty years on, only Bill, Bud Holdgate, (the mid upper gunner), and Bill Morison, are still alive; Dick Meredith died in November 2005. They don’t see each other so often now – Bill Morison is in North York, Ontario, although Bud is from Vancouver – but they do speak regularly. Bill gave me Bill Morison’s and Dick Meredith’s numbers and when I was back in England, I called them. Both were anxious to help and equally quick to heap praise on Bill and their other friends in the crew. ‘Once the engines were running, we became a real team in every sense,’ said Bill Morison, in his gentle and measured voice. ‘We welded perfectly.’ Dick Meredith had been a farmer before the war, a reserved occupation, and could have avoided active service, but admits that he would not have missed the experience for anything. ‘They were all great guys,’ he told me, ‘and we were a dedicated bunch. We were a very good crew, all of us, and we never stopped learning.’

      As the weeks and then months passed, so the crew’s number of missions began to steadily mount – ten were chalked up, then fifteen, then twenty. They went from being the new boys to the most senior and experienced crew in the squadron. Bill was commissioned in December, while at around the same time Bill Morison became the squadron’s navigation leader: it was now up to him to not only help plan their routes to the target, but also improve the standard of the less experienced navigators.

      Casualties during the Battle of Berlin, which lasted from November to the end of March 1944, were particularly high СКАЧАТЬ