Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 1939, the Aviation Candidates Board at Cardington near Bedford interviewed 671 young men. The recruiting officers were delighted at the quality of the applicants. The board could afford to be choosy. Of the 671 who presented themselves, 102, or 15.2 per cent, were rejected.

      The surplus of suitable manpower persisted throughout the war. In the first quarter of 1944, when Bomber Command was suffering terrible losses during the Battle of Berlin, the board still felt able to turn away 22.5 per cent of the volunteers who applied. The great majority of applicants had not waited for an official summons before stepping forward. A much smaller proportion had chosen the RAF after being called up. There were also a number seeking a transfer from the army. The general standard of education of the army candidates tended to be lower than that of the pure volunteers, the board’s head, Group Captain Vere Bettington, observed, and a higher percentage of rejections was to be expected. RAF personnel working on the ground also responded well to appeals to ‘get operational’.

      At first, candidates were required to hold the School Certificate, the multi-subject examination taken by sixteen-year-olds before going on to higher education, but by August 1940 this proviso had been dropped. Nor was leaving school before the age of sixteen considered a bar. The initial test included intelligence, mathematics and general knowledge papers. But Bettington never rejected an applicant on educational grounds alone. ‘A candidate’s desire to fly and fight,’ he declared, is ‘of primary importance.’⁴

      The old RAF’s sensitivity about its arriviste origins had given it a tendency to snobbery. This was dissolved in the flood of men from modest and poor homes taking up the flying duties that had formerly been the preserve of the sons of the military, clerical, medical and colonial middle classes. Harry Yates, who left school at fourteen and worked as a junior clerk in the offices of a printing company in the south Midlands, wondered as he waited for a reply from the RAF whether his lack of education would disqualify him. ‘Could it be,’ he wrote, ‘that, in reality, becoming one of these pilot types required a university education or even an old school tie? Was it the preserve of the sons of the well-to-do? But this, as I was to discover, was far from true. Terrible thing though it was, the war brought opportunity. The great British class system counted for surprisingly little. I saw nothing of it in all my RAF days.’⁵

      The impulse to fly had been stimulated in many applicants by an early encounter with aeroplanes. Brian Frow went to the 1932 Hendon Air Show with a friend from his south-London prep school. ‘I was spellbound,’ he remembered. ‘A hostile fort was bombed with live missiles; balloons forming life-sized animals were chased by big game hunters in fighter aircraft and eventually shot down.’ In the school holidays he cycled to Croydon aerodrome with an aircraft recognition book in his satchel, identifying and recording everything that flew. The fact that his eldest brother, Herbert, had been killed in action flying in the First World War did not dent his enthusiasm. Herbert’s loss was commemorated by a shrine in the family home made out of the wooden propeller of his doomed aircraft.⁶

      Ken Newman, another south-London boy, also made regular pilgrimages to Croydon, which was only a mile or so from his home. ‘As a boy, and like so many others of my generation, I had been fascinated by aeroplanes,’ he recalled. ‘They were seldom seen in the sky and caused open-mouthed surprise when they were … I used to go and watch, from the roof of the airport hotel next to the terminal and flight control building.’ Sometimes an hour or more would pass between the arrivals of the Imperial Airways and KLM airliners ‘but every take-off and landing was exciting, particularly when the aeroplanes came close to the hotel building.’⁷

      In opting for the RAF, volunteers were exercising a choice, and choices were rare in wartime. By doing so, they avoided being drafted into a less congenial branch of the services, and in 1939, there was no more unattractive option than the army.

      The young men arriving at the recruiting centres had been born during, or just after, the end of the First World War. They had heard tales of the Western Front from their fathers and male relations. Dennis Field, the Coventry boy who had witnessed the Blitz from his back-garden shelter, had an uncle who had been in the trenches. ‘His pugnacity and bitterness were apparent even to a youngster,’ he wrote. ‘My friend’s father was a signaller in France and only reluctantly talked of the moonscape devastation, or mud, barbed wire, shell holes, bodies and rats and lice and drownings in mud and filth. My youthful picture was overwhelmingly one of revulsion.’⁸

      In the streets, the sight of men who had lost limbs, the wheezing and hacking of gas-damaged lungs, told young men what they could expect. Aeroplanes were intrinsically dangerous, everyone knew that. But they were also exciting. And death in an aeroplane seemed quicker and cleaner in comparison with what they would face on land.

      Jim Berry, who became a Pathfinder pilot, used to look with fascination and a tremor of fear at a German bayonet which his father had brought back from the trenches. ‘[He] used to tell us stories about the first war and it sounded horrific to me,’ he said. ‘The mud and the mess. It was something we looked at with a fair amount of horror as children. I thought that’s not for me at any price. If I had been made to go I would have had to go but I thought, well, I’m going to volunteer so I volunteered and (went for) aircrew.’⁹

      The RAF, as Group Captain Bettington said, was looking for people who were eager not only to fly but to fight. The First World War had generated a hatred of conflict and yearning for peace that was evident in the great popularity of the pacifist movement. Yet the hope amongst the young that they would not be called on to take part in another great war seldom hardened into a determination not to do so. Charles Patterson, born in 1920 and brought up in middle-class comfort by his mother and sister after his parents separated, found that his early childhood ‘was overshadowed by the terrible First World War and the appalling suffering and sacrifices which were implanted in me not just by my mother but by all the grown-ups with whom I came into contact.’ It was ‘something so appalling that it just could not be ever allowed to happen again, because if it did, it would be virtually the end of the world.’

      He felt, nevertheless, that ‘if another war came I would inevitably have to join up as soon as it began, to try and fight. It was very firmly implanted in my mind that the greatest sacrifices in the first war had been endured by the ordinary Tommy. What I believed and was taught was that if these young, working-class boys could show such courage it made it absolutely imperative on me to not let them down, or at least make an effort to live up to what they had done should another war come.’

      As the war approached Patterson considered his choices. It was quite simple really. ‘I could never have stood up to the rigours of fighting on land and in dust and heat and dirt and so on. That simply would have been quite beyond me.’ He knew something about flying from his brother-in-law, an RAF pilot who had taken him up in a Gypsy Moth when he was ten. Like many others he had seen Dawn Patrol, a remarkably bleak and unidealized story of First World War aviators which nonetheless pushed many adolescent boys into the arms of the RAF. ‘[It] had a tremendous influence on me. It struck me that although the casualties were very heavy it was much the most exciting and wonderful way to go to war.’¹⁰

      The decision to fight was made easier by the seeming inevitability of the conflict. The Germans had left Britain with no choice. To the older airmen, this came as no surprise. Peter Johnson, who was nearly five when the first war broke out and whose naval officer father was killed in 1914, felt that ‘mass hatred … was inoculated into my generation against the Germans’.¹¹ He was at least ten years older than most of his comrades in Bomber Command. The writings and recollections of the younger men do not reveal much evidence of instinctive loathing for the Hun.

      A surprising number of them had some direct or indirect contact with events in Germany. When he was about fourteen, Ken Newman made friends with a German boy called Erich Strauss who had come from Stuttgart to visit his grandmother. ‘It was during one of our walks around Mitcham Common that he told me he and his family СКАЧАТЬ