Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ civilization. But the thought would carry little conviction. A German city was always this, this hellish picture of flame, gunfire and searchlights, an unreal picture because we could not hear it or feel its breath. Sometimes when the smoke rolled back and we saw streets and buildings I felt startled. Perhaps if we had seen the white, upturned faces of people, as over England we sometimes did, our hearts would have rebelled.’⁸

      Harris liked to call the successive phases of the air war ‘battles’. There was a Battle of Hamburg, a Battle of the Ruhr, a Battle of Berlin. But they were not battles as most people understood the word. There was not one enemy, waiting and visible, but many. The crews were constantly at the mercy of the weather and mechanical failure. On the approach routes and over the targets they faced searchlights, flak and night-fighters. There was no relaxation on the way home. The last minutes were sometimes as dangerous as the time over target as the skies above the base filled with aircraft, many of them sieved with flak and cannon holes, clinging to the air with their last few gallons of petrol, praying for the signal to touch down.

      Flying in bombers was an extraordinarily dangerous activity. Harris, with his usual harsh honesty, asked people to bear in mind that ‘these crews, shining youth on the threshold of life, lived under circumstances of intolerable strain. They were in fact – and they knew it – faced with the virtual certainty of death, probably in one of its least pleasant forms.’⁹

      Altogether 55,573 Bomber Command aircrew – British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealanders and others – were killed. That is out of a total of 125,000 who served. Another 8,403 were wounded and 9,838 taken prisoner. In simple terms that means 44.4 per cent of those who flew, died. The real picture was rather grimmer. Many of those included in the overall aircrew figure were still training when the war ended and never saw action. According to one study, the true figure is closer to 65 per cent. The chances of death then, were appallingly high, far higher than those facing soldiers and sailors. The life expectancy of an airman was considerably shorter even than that of a junior infantry officer on the Western Front in 1916.¹⁰ To Peter Johnson who swapped a cushy instruction post for operational flying, the enterprise sometimes seemed like the Charge of the Light Brigade, over and over again.

      It was no wonder that crews discussed obsessively the odds on their survival and tried to discern some pattern in the tapestry of death. It was very confusing. Some ‘sprog’ crews fresh from a training unit got the ‘chop’ first time out. But so did veterans on their last but one trip of their thirty-operation tour. Good pilots died inexplicably and poor ones blundered through. It was all down to luck and Lady Luck, capricious tart that she was, had to be wooed and cosseted constantly. The modern young men in the bombers were as superstitious as mediaeval peasants. Final preparations would be thrown into chaos if someone lost his lucky silk stocking or remembered he had forgotten a pre-operation ritual. They also developed a mediaeval fatalism. Flying was ‘dicing’ and death was ‘the reaper’.

      But despite death’s towering presence, it could still seem curiously remote. It was a common experience to see an aeroplane just like your own, ahead of you in the bomber stream, suddenly explode as flak ignited hundreds of gallons of petrol and thousands of pounds of explosive. It was not unusual to watch as a night-fighter nosed upwards beneath the pregnant belly of an unsuspecting neighbour and with one squirt of its vertically-directed guns sent it screaming down.

      After witnessing these dreadful sights, crews were often struck by the complexity and selfishness of their feelings. ‘Suddenly,’ wrote Harry Yates, a Lancaster pilot, ‘ahead of us in the stream a vic of three kites was consumed in a prodigious burst of flame which immediately erupted outwards under the force of the secondary explosion. The leader had been hit in the bomb bay, the others were too close. No one could have survived, I knew. There was no point in looking for parachutes. I flew on straight and level, Tubby standing beside me, both of us dumbstruck by the appallingly unfair swiftness and violence of it all. But there was still that deeply-drawn breath of relief that somebody else, and not oneself, had run out of luck. And hard on the heels of that was a pang of guilt. One grieved for whoever was in the kites and wondered if friends might not be coming home …’¹¹

      For all the danger, operations involved little that could be described as exciting or could later be interpreted as glamorous. There were stretches of tedium. For wireless operators and bombaimers there was little to do for much of the time. Only the navigator and the pilot were kept permanently occupied and there was not much fun in flying bombers. Piloting a Lancaster was nothing like skidding across the skies in a Spitfire. It was a task rather than a pleasure, requiring endless tiny adjustments and constant vigilance. Guy Gibson, the leader of the Dams Raid, compared bomber pilots to bus-drivers.

      There was a complete absence of comfort. The rear gunner, stuck at the ‘arse end’ of a Lancaster, froze. The wireless operator, stuck next to the port inner engine, often roasted. Everyone was swaddled in multiple layers of clothing surmounted by parachute harness and Mae West lifejacket. It was hard work moving around the cramped, equipment-stacked interior, where every edge was sharp and threatened injury.

      On the ground life was far removed from the ease of the RAF’s pre-war existence and there were few of the comforts or entertainments available to the fighter pilots of 1940 when they touched down at the end of the day. Writing to his wife from his first squadron, Flying Officer Reg Fayers was anxious to dispel any idea that the organization he had joined resembled ‘Max Aitken’s RAF’. Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s son, had fought in the Battle of Britain and was a model of style and sophistication. ‘You are fastidious and sweetsmelling cleanliness,’ Fayers declared. ‘You are gentle, you are comfort … the RAF is opposite in all respects.’¹²

      The defining sound of Bomber Command life was not the cheerful blare of the mess gramophone but the patter of rain on a Nissen hut roof. The pervading smell was not the whiff of expensive scent but the reek of coke from a smoky stove. Opening the doors of their quarters the crews looked out not at the green, upholstered Sussex hills or the fertile fields of the Weald but the vast skies and watery steppes of Lincolnshire.

      Fighter pilots went to the pub by car. Bomber Boys travelled by bike or bus. They drank flat, weak beer in drab pubs and dance-halls where they competed for the favours of young women war-workers. Sex was in the air but when it took place it was often urgent and utilitarian. What they really wanted was love and it flared up often, as fierce and incandescent as the pyrotechnics that marked the targets they bombed. Sometimes it was just as ephemeral.

      But once on ‘ops’, the world of lovers, friends and families beyond the base dwindled and faded, to be replaced by a different reality. The future stretched no further than the next few hours. Life was reversed. Night became day and day became night, the time when the crews went to work. Then, to each crew member the only people who mattered were those around him. There were only seven people in existence and the universe had shrunk to the size of a bomber plane.

       1 Learning the Hard Way

      On the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939, at bases all over Britain, ground and air crews stood by for the announcement that after many false alarms they were finally to be launched into battle. At Scampton, ‘Sunny Scampton’ as it was wryly nicknamed on account of the usually dismal Lincolnshire weather, the men of ‘A’ Flight, 89 Squadron, were smoking and chatting in the flight commander’s office while they waited for the prime minister to speak on the radio. At 11 a.m. the talking stopped and the room filled with the low, apprehensive voice of Neville Chamberlain telling them that, as of that moment, a state of war existed between Britain and Germany.

      Until then, the flight commander, Anthony Bridgman, had been a study in unconcern. Now he took his feet from his desk, exhaled a slow stream of cigarette smoke and spoke, ‘quietly and rather strangely’ СКАЧАТЬ