Dangers of war
Dangers
of war
An Early Raid - 1939 Harry Jones
I pedalled into the aerodrome and they said, "Hurry up, you're flying." This was 8 o'clock in the morning.
There was not a cloud in the sky - it was unreal. Wellingtons were scattered all over the sky. You thought the flak was going to hit you straight between the eyes and then it veered off. We went through a huge barrage and you couldn't see anything except big puffs of black smoke. As we came through the barrage there were the Messerschmitts waiting for us. We hadn't got any guns at all. All our gadgets had packed in so we had no front gun, no rear gun or anything. We discovered afterwards that they used the wrong oil in our hydraulic system.
During one of these attacks I was hit in the back and then through the ankle. I rang up the skipper and said, "I've been hit and it bloody well hurts."
He told me to come to the front and get it dressed. I staggered to the front of the aircraft. The wireless operator saw my ankle and got a hypodermic syringe and bunged this stuff through my flying trousers into my leg, which killed some of the pain.
Then he was hit and killed immediately. He went a funny sort of grey and purple and died. A Messerschmitt sat on our tail and shot right through the aeroplane, through the rear turret and out through the front of the aircraft. I was sitting on the bed behind the wireless operator's area watching the blood coming out of my foot. The second pilot had to stand with his legs astride and the bullets going between his legs. Then a bullet hit him in the thigh.
I heard the skipper say he had got to go down. We had caught fire. We were over an island off the German coast and he found a bit of beach to land on. We were burning by now. I got to the hatch at the top and pulled myself up but l got stuck and I could feel the flames burning my rear end. The others pulled me out and carried me to the sand dunes."
Harry
Jones,
Bomber Command rear gunner
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On the brink Harold Nash
'We had finished training and were being driven to the Operational Training Unit where you are put together as a crew. It was in the coach as we were approaching - I can remember the very road, I can remember the trees - when suddenly I realised good God, I might get killed. All those boyish dreams and ventures went.
We teamed as a crew, we did circuits, we flew round England, and six weeks afterwards we were sent to No. 10 squadron.
I had a feeling of unease in my stomach the whole time. I can remember the first operation. I used to like Dickens and I can remember sitting in the operations room with the flying suit on ready to go out. Just before I put the suit on I was reading Pickwick Papers and I kept reading the same page over and over again. Nothing was absorbed, nothing went in. There was a confusion in my mind, a kind of inner alienation from my usual calm. But we were good actors. We all pretended that everything was well.'
Harold
Nash,
Bomber Command navigator
Beating the weather John Gee
'Icing was always a big problem in the winter weather. You would take off and climb through a bank of cloud. The aircraft would be slow climbing and you could see the ice forming on the wings. It was not only the weight of ice that affected the aircraft, but it changed the shape of the wings and the thing became almost uncontrollable. Ice would also get on the propellers, but more insidiously it would get into the carburetors of the engine. You could operate the hot air control incorrectly and create a situation in which it was making ice. The critical range was from about -4 degrees to +4 degrees. The cooling effect of the petrol going through the carburetor caused ice to form, so that from just above freezing the temperature of the carburetor could be actually below freezing. You had to bring in your hot air control to bring the temperature up, but make sure you knocked it out again quickly as you went up because as the temperature dropped again you fell back into that dangerous zone. Then you wanted cold air.
I'm sure a lot of young pilots who had been butchers and bakers and all sorts of things, and then done flying training in America or South Africa, didn't understand this and got iced up. We had a terrible raid on Berlin in about October or November in 1941 and lost about 45 aeroplanes, the highest loss of the war up to that point. I'm sure most of the aeroplanes went down due to bad weather and I doubt any of them found the target. If we got iced up on the way there we just had to come back. We'd get down below and get the engine running again, try to bomb something like an aerodrome in Holland and come back to base. I remember the Wing Commander saying the next day, "Well, thank God you're back because we lost three aeroplanes last night ."
Sir Richard Peirse was C-in-C Bomber Command at that time, and Churchill sent him a message saying, "It's all right bombing the Germans, but don't try and beat the weather".
John
Gee,
Bomber Command pilot
A minelaying disaster Robert Kee
'It was a mine laying trip off the Friesians, exactly the same trip as I had done on my first operation about six months before. This time I was the first pilot. You had to lay mines from a very low height, about 400 feet with the magnetic mines. We came down to 400 feet and the navigator said, "I can't understand what's happening. We should be there but the sea has stopped and I can't see a coastline shape at all."
We flew around a bit, no-one firing at us. We realised what had happened. The sea had frozen over, it was very cold in February, so that the outlines of the land were indecipherable anyway. Whether we were over the right island we couldn't tell. Finally it turned out we were over the next-door one, so we were in the right lane for laying the mines. We thought we would lay them there because it was obviously an island, and obviously a bit of sea.
And then I can't really say what happened. I remember suddenly searchlights were on us and a total feeling of chaos. I remember seeing some tracer, but I don't remember any feeling of being hit. I do remember very strongly the feeling that the engine had no power. We were in a spin at 400 feet. I had been told by my instructor that the only hope in a Hampden in a spin is to push the nose down as hard as you can, which I did even though the ground was very close. The next thing that I remember was the shattering of everything and thinking, "This is it!"
The navigator and I were saved by the fact that the aircraft must have been just regained flying speed. We slithered along the ice with minimum friction. We were in the forward, up tilted part of the aircraft and survived. The two gunners were both killed in the crash. They were smashed to bits at the back of the aircraft. After the crash I was able to pull the navigator, who was unconscious, some of the way away from the wreckage in case the 2,000 pound magnetic mine went off. I then made off over the dunes, just trying to get away from the possibility of capture.
Eventually a rather frightened German soldier appeared over the dunes shouting at me. I said what I had learned to say from films of the First World War. When you were taken prisoner you said "Kamerad". He took me into his dugout where there was a very polite and friendly naval officer - it was a naval flak unit - who spoke excellent English and had been at Oxford in the 'twenties. It became very unreal. I heard him reporting over the telephone: "We shot one down by flak!"
I spent the night there, and the next morning a small Fieseler Storch aircraft came over from Holland. I remember thinking - a slightly romantic notion one had of being an RAF pilot - that now I must try and escape. There had been one case of a Hampden pilot who had managed to get control of what was probably a Storch, and killed the German pilot and flown it back to Britain. I thought that I would get into the aircraft and hit the pilot over the head and try to fly it. Now it seems absolutely ludicrous, because actually when we got into the thing there was another Luftwaffe officer with us who immediately produced a revolver and sat facing me. It was a tiny little aircraft and I was squashed in the back and he sat facing me throughout. I had to drop that romantic notion. At the same time I was by then beginning to feel extremely relieved to be still alive. Then I heard the phrase that I was to hear over and over again for the next few days: "For you the war is over!" And indeed it was.'
Robert
Kee,
Bomber Command pilot
A Royal visit Charles Patterson
When I was in 114 Squadron on Blenheims in the summer of 1941 at West Raynham the King and Queen paid a visit to the station and to the Squadron which was in the middle of an intense operational period. I was a Flight Commander at the time, I went from Pilot Officer to Squadron Leader in six weeks due to the casualties.
Each Flight Commander had to take first the King and then the Queen and present their flight who were all lined up in the crew room. I took the Queen Mother up to the line. Of course we'd all been very strictly briefed that the only thing we said when the King or the Queen offered us their hand was "How do you do Sir" or "How do you do Ma'am" and nothing else and then if they asked you a question you answered it.
Well we came up, I brought the Queen or Queen Mother as she became, up the line presenting each one by name and she took each one by the hand and looked up at these young chaps, we were all, none of us were more than 22, looked up at each one as much as to say "I think you're just too, too wonderful." Then to my horror one young Yorkshire Sergeant Air Gunner, a sort of tall, raw bone youth was so overcome that he seized the Queen Mother's hand with both of his and said "Oh, I am so pleased to meet Your Majesty!" I nearly passed out - I thought, "God, I've had it now" and all she did was put here other hand on top of his and say "No more pleased than I am to meet you Sergeant I assure you" and that absolutely made his day - he was on cloud nine. A week later he was dead.
Charles
Patterson
Bomber Command pilot
Learning by experience Wilkie Wanless
'The one failing of the whole training system was that we weren't told more of what to expect. We just learned it strictly from experience, except for the pilot who had done two trips as a rule before he took his own crew. He didn't tell us much about what to expect: In fact I don't remember the pilot telling us anything. I was a tail gunner in a Halifax and away we went. One night we got attacked by two fighters. I shot down the one that came in from the rear - a JU-88, and the mid-upper gunner spotted the one underneath and the pilot was able to take violent evasive action. Unfortunately the bomb aimer was mortally wounded and died after we went back to England. Within a few hours everybody was shook up. The wireless operator got hit in the rear end with a fragment of cannon shell and the aircraft was just shattered. The bomb aimer was standing in the astrodome and he was hit in the head. The attack hit the top of the aircraft. The flaps came down and the undercarriage came down; the bomb doors fell open; we had no hydraulics; the wireless set blew up and we had to fly another 2 hours or more to get back to England. We landed at a fighter aerodrome in the south of England. We didn't crash, we landed wheels down.
We had some leave to go to the bomb aimer's funeral and then went back on ops. From then on you were pretty apprehensive. I'm not going to say strict discipline because it wasn't a matter of strictness, it was a matter of strong discipline. There was no chatter, no unnecessary banter on the intercom. There was silence. When somebody switched that mike on everybody knew it and everybody was listening. You'd hear them breathing - and if they'd nothing to say the pilot would ask who was on the mike. You were apprehensive. After my original crew got shot down I flew with various crews. One crew I went with on their first trip and that was at the time I'd done 20 or 21 trips. That was an unforgettable experience because they just chattered the whole time: "Look at the lights!", "Look at that!", "Do you see that?". Finally I was such a nervous wreck that I had to tell them to keep quiet and they did. It was not a happy trip. But we got home fine. They unfortunately went missing a couple of trips later. They never did get any experience.'
Wilkie
Wanless,
Bomber Command rear gunner
Premonitions John Gee
'Everybody felt that every time they took off on a bomb operation there was a good chance that they weren't going to come back. They knew that some of them weren't coming back, but it was a question of who. Some people went down on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth operation, some did 20, 30, 40 - it was a matter of luck. There was skill in landing or combating the weather and some aircraft crashed for lack of skill on the part of the pilot. But generally speaking you either survived or you didn't survive by luck. The crews carried things like their girlfriends' stockings around their necks for luck. I had a piece of flak that had gone through the window of a Wellington on an operation fairly early in the war and lodged in my headrest. It missed my head by 3 inches. Next day the crew fished it out of the headrest and gave it to me. I carried this in my pocket for two and a half years, and one day it went missing. I thought, "I know what will happen, I'll go missing on the next operation." It was on the 13th, and it was my 13th operation of my second tour. You turn these things over in your mind.
There was a terrible case just after that when my crew went missing on a mining operation. It had been cancelled for perhaps four nights. On the day of the operation we went across the aerodrome. A sunny afternoon it was, and as we walked back from the aeroplane the pilot who was flying my crew said, "I feel a terrible premonition about this operation. If I had the guts I would take myself off the battle order - but if I did I would never be able to look the squadron in the face again." I was terribly upset and told him I would fly. He wouldn't hear of it. These five aircraft went, three from my flight and two from another flight, on the mining operation. I waited for them coming back, and three came back but two were missing One was my crew and I was absolutely distraught. I went back to my room and I couldn't speak. It was only four weeks before the end of the war. A dreadful thing. When VE Day came only a month later and there was all the celebration, I sat there with my head in my hands. I didn't know where to put myself.'
John
Gee,
Bomber Command pilot
The Augsburg Raid, April 17th 1942 Wing Commander Rod Rodley DSO DFC AE
'When the curtain drew back at the briefing there was a roar of laughter instead of a gasp of horror. No one believed that the airforce would be so stupid as to send 12 of its newest four-engined bombers all that distance inside Germany in daylight. We sat back and waited calmly for someone to say "Now the real target is this". Unfortunately it was the real target, a factory near Munich that was a major manufacturer of diesel engines for submarines.
At that time it was touch and go in the North Atlantic between Britain having enough to eat and not having enough to eat. The crews were determined that these diesels should not go forth in submarines. The route took us low, at about 100 feet, down to the south coast, across the Channel. We were to join 44 Squadron at the south coast, six aircraft from each squadron, and we were to go as a formation of 12 the rest of the way. We saw 44 Squadron slightly ahead of us, but we realised that they were drifting to port, and we continued in the direction we should have been going.
Our six aircraft pressed on very, very low across the Channel so that we were underneath the radar. I could see the sandbanks of France coming up ahead of us. We had no opposition at all crossing the defended coast. We proceeded south of Paris where I saw the second enemy aircraft I saw during the whole war. It was probably a courier - a Heinkel 111. It approached and, recognising us, did a 90-degree bank turn back towards Paris. We continued on flying at 100 feet.
Occasionally you would see some Frenchmen take a second look and wave their berets or their shovels. A bunch of German soldiers doing PT in their singlets broke hurriedly for their shelters as we roared over. The next opposition was a German officer on one of the steamers on Lake Constanz firing a revolver at us. I could see him quite clearly, defending the ladies with his Luger against 48 Browning machine guns.
Our route took us from the north end of Lake Constanz across another lake, where we turned north towards the target. We hadn't seen a thing on the way of the German Air Force. We were belting at full throttle at about 100 feet towards the targets. I dropped the bombs along the side wall. We flashed across the target and down the other side to about 50 feet, because flak was quite heavy. As we went away I could see light flak shells overtaking us, green balls flowing away on our right and hitting the ground ahead of us. Leaving the target I looked down at our leader's aircraft and saw that there was a little wisp of steam trailing back from it. The white steam turned to black smoke, with fire in the wing. I was slightly above him. In the top of the Lancaster there was a little wooden hatch for getting out if you had to land at sea. I realised that this wooden hatch had burned away and I could look down into the fuselage. It looked like a blow lamp with the petrol swilling around the wings and the centre section, igniting the fuselage and the slipstream blowing it down. Just like a blow lamp.
He dropped back and I asked our gunner to keep an eye on him. Suddenly he said, "Oh God, Skip, he's gone. He looks like a chrysanthemum of fire."
One other of our aircraft caught fire just short of the target, but kept on, dropped the bombs and then crashed. The raid was suicidal. Four from 97 Squadron got back, but only one from 44 Squadron. Five out of twelve."
Wing
Commander,
Rod Rodley DSO DFC AE
Winning a VC Bill Reid VC
'We went to 10,000 feet over England, and then headed for the first track over the Dutch coast. I was at 20,000 feet and then the gunner asked me to come down a bit because he was feeling cold. His heating was not working, and I turned up the oxygen a bit. Suddenly, just after we had crossed the coast, there was a great bang from underneath. I thought it was flak because there had been no warnings, but the gunner had actually tried to fire. It was a Focke-Wulf 19O. I dropped 2,000 feet because the windscreen had been shattered and I had been hit in the shoulder. It felt just like a hammer, not a spear. I did not feel as if I was going to drop off so I thought there was no point in talking much about it. I asked the navigator to set another course at about 19,000 feet. I kept looking at my watch. A quarter of an hour later we were attacked by a Messerschmitt, which knocked out the compasses, and the intercom and hydraulics on the port side. We dropped another 2,000 feet. It had hit the port elevator - so it meant holding the stick back in your belly to keep the plane flying straight. The engineer was wounded in the forearm. The bomb-aimer was still down at the front. He did not realise until the bombing run that anyone was hurt, because we could not talk to each other. This was probably a good thing, because there may have been panic.
I asked the engineer for another course because the compass was broken. He came back and indicated that the navigator had been knocked out. I had a feeling he would come to and take over again, but I looked round for the Pole Star and found it. That night we were heading for Cologne where we were dropping spoof flares to get their fighters away, and then turning and bombing Dusseldorf. Our timing was very accurate. If you had to bomb at half past ten, you had to bomb at half past ten. We saw the flares going down, and I pointed ahead to the target. I held it steady and felt the bombs going off and headed back home. That was the difficult part, but I thought as long as I hit the English coast someone will find me a landing. The other thing on my mind at the time was to get back because we had wounded on board. There was no way we could bale out with all the wounded. On the way back we went up and down, up and down. Because we had no oxygen in the system, the engineer gave me the little bottles that we carried, like small fire extinguishers, that you can clip on to your mask. Eventually we ran out. I wanted to get down below oxygen height, which is 10,000 feet, but I didn't want to come down too soon in case there was a big flak area that would shoot us down.
When I saw the sea - it might have been the Zuider Zee - I came down to 7,000 feet. We were flying on and suddenly the four engines cut, and I thought, "Well, here it comes". The engineer remembered then that he had not switched the petrol tanks over. There are three petrol tanks on each wing and you normally try and keep them level in case you get hit, so that you don't lose all your petrol. He had left the main tanks the whole time as we had been so busy doing other things. He switched over to the other tanks and it started up.
We flew on and saw a coast coming up. He kept telling me to get down, get down, because there was not much petrol left. I saw this canopy of searchlights, so we headed for that. It was a fairly big aerodrome, so I just circled round and flashed my landing light on and off as a distress signal, because I could not talk to them. We had no hydraulics, so we needed to pull a bottle of compressed air to flood the system, so that I could put the wheels and flaps down. I had been hit in the head and it had frozen up, but it came alive again when we were lower and warmer and it began to bleed. I told them to stand by for crash landing. They stood behind me in case I passed out, and put out flares because there had been a touch of fog.
We came in and just touched down at the end of the runway, and as we did the undercarriage collapsed. It had been shot through. The plane was on her belly for about 50 yards and it was only then that I realised that the navigator was dead, because he slipped forward from his cabin. It was an American aerodrome I had landed at, Shipton in Norfolk. They scrambled on to the plane and opened up the dinghy escape and got us all out through the top. The wireless operator walked out even though he was wounded. They whipped us on to stretchers and into an ambulance and away. They had had a crash on the aerodrome two hours earlier that night with a Lancaster. The rear gunner was all but saved but then burned as it caught on fire. We were sent to the air force hospital about three days later. The next day the wireless operator died. He must have been shot through the chest.
The CO came down to see me in hospital. He asked me why I didn't turn back. I said that I thought it was safer to go on because we were still all flying in this big box of planes 10 miles wide and 10 miles deep, and it would have meant flying back through these and probably pranging one. It was not a case of going on regardless. It was the safest thing to do.'
Bill
Reid VC,
Bomber
Command pilot
Middle East posting Greg Gregson
'We were on a raid into Tobruk, laying mines. We moved to an advance base, and I met this rear gunner who flew with us sitting on a concrete block outside the mess.
"Don't sit there" I said. "You'll get piles."
He replied, "Oh, I'll be on a cold slab before the morning anyway".
"Don't be so daft," I said.
"You can do one of these raids," he said "but you can't do two."
I went over to him and said, 'Look, go sick. It's a night raid - go sick and you won't be missed."
"We'll go," he said.
We were laying mines low level and we had to drop them in precise positions because the Navy were going in with high-speed launches. It meant several runs over the target. On the first run there was a terrific bang outside the rear turret. The intercom went. We sent somebody down to have a look and he was splattered. We didn't take him out of the turret, we scraped him out. He knew it was coming. How, I don't know.'
Greg
Gregson,
Bomber Command WOP/AG
Baling out Bill Reid VC
'It was a simple raid. It was east of Paris in daylight at the end of July [1944], and we were bombing this tunnel that stored V1 bombs 30 miles east of Paris. 617 Squadron were bombing the southern end and 9 Squadron were bombing the northern end to shut the tunnel. There were 300 planes with 12 single 1,000-pound delayed-action bombs to drop to prevent the Germans from salvaging the V1s. We had 12,000-pounders and we were at 12,000 feet to make sure we could see it. We went in a gaggle. It was the first time I took my camera with me in the plane. It was supposed to be bad luck taking a camera! I took a few shots of the other planes. There was flak ahead and the crew told me not to bother to take pictures of it because there were Mosquitoes covering the picture side. There were four and a half minutes left to stabilize the bombsight. The bomb aimer said "Hold it, Hold it" and then bang! The outer engine fell off and something went through the plane. The stick went sloppy in my hand and I said, "Stand by to bale out!"
My engineer handed me my chute. I took my helmet off and put my chute on. I shouted, "Bale out!", and the crew all dashed to the front to get their chutes and to get down the escape hatch at the front. If you have plenty of time you ask the rear gunners to come up, but in an emergency like this, with the plane beginning to spin down, they get out as soon as they can from the back. I could not get out of my seat, so I tried to open the side window but couldn't open it. I couldn't open the other window. I remember all the dinghies fell out. I turned the escape handle in the escape hatch, and as I turned it the whole nose of the plane must have come off because the next thing I knew I was falling through the air and felt for my chute. There was quiet - no engine noise. I felt for my cord, pulled it. I thought it was not working when it suddenly jerked. I held on like grim death because I was not sure if I had put it on right. I could see trees coming up. I kept my legs together as all good men should do and slid into the trees. I thought I had broken my leg it was so numb. My hand was broken, hit when I came through the hatch, and my face was all burned. I got down from the tree, took my chute off and poked it under a bush and then looked for my escape route. I could hear the bombs still going off because of the delayed action. I was quite near the target so I headed away. I had a dressing with me which you always carried and I sat and wrapped up my hand. I thought, "If I go further south I could speak French and make my way back.
The invasion forces were the other side of Paris. I stood up, and there were three big Germans with rifles and bayonets standing round me. They had seen the parachutes coming down into the trees. I saw the tail part of my plane in the trees and I pointed to it to see if I could go to it. By that time a German had come up who spoke better English than I did. He was wearing white jodhpurs. He thought I was American because it was a daylight raid. I went to my plane. The mid upper gunner was just inside, in the tailplane, dead. The rear turret was about 20 yards from the plane with the rear gunner in it dead with his chute. He had managed to get his chute on, but when he headed out he hit the ground. Twenty minutes later they came up with my wireless operator with his ankle all twisted. His chute must have opened in the plane and torn, because he hit the ground too fast and knocked himself out.
I took it that the rest of the crew were all safe. They had been in front of me and I had followed out after them. Our navigator was a French Canadian, so I thought he would be all right, and Chunky, my engineer, was a big strong chap. I thought, "Lucky devils, they are definitely away". And it was not until we came back from prison that I found out they had all been killed. Whether they had been trapped in the nose, or their chutes had not opened, I don't know. They are buried in France.'
Bill
Reid VC,
Bomber
Command pilot
No writing home Maurice Chick
'When the flight crews arrived in the Mess you got an idea from their general behaviour and attitude how long they would last. We would bet among ourselves - "Oh, he'll make it" or "He won't make it". Sitting in a corner writing home was not the sort of thing the average chap did. There were too many things to do to worry about your mother. The young marrieds were the ones who suffered most. We just enjoyed ourselves in our free time. We loved flying. There were sadder times, if a crew didn't return. One night we lost three aeroplanes, 21 people. There was the ritual of moving their kit from the room. Not 24 hours later, or even less, a truck would come through the gates with the new crews to replace those lost. They would come into the Mess where those who had been on the Squadron for a month or two were considered old hands.
I don't think we worried about it at the time. We had a job to do. Our role was flying aeroplanes to do whatever we could for the war effort. Of course, one never got to know people for any length of time. On the Squadron we knew that it was short-lived, that we would move on if we survived to the end of our tour. We sorted out our friends. The loners, the ones who sat writing letters home, these were the ones that didn't seem to last. The ones who enjoyed life, who seemed a bit juvenile at times, survived. My best friend on the Squadron survived with me. There were others that I knew very well who were killed. That was Mess life. Squadron life. It was an odd feeling - I could look back and think I was very hard, that people were hard, but they weren't really. It was a matter of accepting it. This is what happened in war.
Maurice
Chick,
Bomber Command Pathfinder pilot
Mental and physical exhaustion Peter Sarll, a Blenheim pilot on 21 Squadron, (later Sqn Ldr) writing of the desperate days of May 1940
I don’t remember how many we lost then, the awful moments I do remember were going back into the village of Watton (in Norfolk) where the young wives were waiting for their husbands who had not returned, and never would.
I do not think that anyone who did not experience what we were called upon to perform this day (14th May) could ever visualize the tremendous courage of our people, so many of whom died. We were three to a crew, twelve crews to a squadron, and our lives depended upon one another. We reached out to one another for strength and support: when one was low, we tried to boost him up. I remember seeing many of them vomiting before getting into the aircraft - a sure sign of physical and mental exhaustion. There was, too, the toll of the stand-bys, at 30-minute readiness in the aircraft, taxying to take-off, and then being recalled because the square that was chalked on the observer’s map was the position of our own troops; and so back to dispersal, switch-off, and then that awful waiting again . . . Having a second tour on Lancasters and experiencing the smoothness of the higher organization and its tremendous efficiency, I used to look back on the old Blenheim days and wonder how any of us survived.
Peter
Sarll
Bomber Command pilot
Ditching in the North Sea Raymond Chance, a Whitley pilot with 77 Squadron, was ordered to attack German shipping in Trondheim. Over the North Sea, an engine failed…….
Came to the conclusion ditching was inevitable and asked the crew who could swim. Two couldn’t, so I told them to stick near me when we touched down ... In an effort to maintain height everything movable was thrown out, but to no avail. Told everyone for ditching to get near the back door and brace themselves against the bulkhead. I went down the fuselage and chopped off the rear door with the fire axe then when back to the pilot’s seat. Then suddenly the aircraft, which had been in a shallow gliding attitude, dived steeply towards the sea.
I knew we had only seconds to live, and trying to be as calm as possible, told the others we were levelling off. Then bang! She blew up and I was flung somewhere in the wreckage in the nose and knocked unconscious. I hallucinated….. Suddenly the reality of the situation hit me . . . The engine and the wing were on fire with the fuel spreading from the ruptured tanks. I could see no one in the aircraft and was about to jump into the sea when I saw the dinghy still folded lying down towards the tail inside the fuselage . . . I knew the men were outside somewhere but hadn’t got the dinghy. I dived for it like a rugger tackle, dragged it to the door, and . . . flung it with all my strength into the dark towards the tail and immediately plunged after it.
My Mae West shot me to the surface; I found the dinghy, pulled the cord, and it started to inflate. As it did the two who I understood couldn’t swim started to climb in - think they had been hanging on the tail. We were joined by. … the bomb-aimer, who I was told was now hanging on the other side of the dinghy. I didn’t know then that I had a crushed ankle, a broken leg, and a hair-line skull fracture.
There then followed the tense, desperate moments of superhuman effort to gain release from the cords of the dinghy, push it away from the flames of the sinking aircraft, and give succour to Pilot Officer Hall who was some fifty yards away crying for help.
I told the survivors I would have to wait to get my breath back before I would be able to get back into the dinghy. It may have been fifteen minutes before I could clamber in. Eventually I was hauled in and collapsed inside the rim of the dinghy. I hadn’t the strength to lift my head out of the water in the bottom and was saved from drowning by one of the survivors putting his boot under my chin. I heard Pilot Officer Hall shouting, but more faintly, and conceived the idea of going over the side and trying to drag the dinghy towards him. I got up on one elbow, but fell back exhausted. I had the agony of listening to him drown.
Raymond
Chance
Bomber Command pilot
Note: During the night, to keep up warmth and spirits, Chance led his crew in singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’. Then, just before dawn came the miraculous appearance of a British destroyer. It had been chasing a U-boat, and its searchlight beamed on to the dinghy, at first mistaken for a floating mine. A whaler promptly rowed over and picked up the distressed airmen, who then summoned up their last strength to climb a rope-ladder on to the destroyer. There was no doctor aboard, but the crew laid out mattresses for the rescued men, wrapped Chance’s foot, by then black and barely recognisable, in cotton wool, and thoughtfully placed a bottle of whisky and two hundred cigarettes by his side.
The conquering of fear Leonard Cheshire VC
Note: Leonard Cheshire was perhaps the most inspirational of wartime squadron commanders. He had much experience of how men coped with the stress of combat.
One man’s thinking of the danger and he’s frightened. The other man’s thinking “We’ve got to get there”. The second man will do the more spectacular thing but I feel the first man has done the braver thing. I can’t really see where there is courage except where there is fear. It’s the conquering of fear’.
Leonard Cheshire, VC.
Bomber Command pilot
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A call for volunteers Flight Lieutenant M. Tomlinson, Intelligence Officer, Coningsby 4/5 April 1941.
Coningsby 106 Squadron. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (but possibly at that early stage some other German vessel or vessels) were at Brest and presented a shockingly heavily defended target. Volunteers were called to go in low. (Wicked in my opinion.) The CO Wing Commander P. Polglase (a very well-bred quiet man) felt obliged to volunteer. His 2nd Pilot and Navigator was a stocky little Northerner, P/O W. Brown, absolutely new to ops. 'Brownie' had had a son on 5th March. "I don't want to volunteer to go in low," he said to me, " I've only seen my son once. But what can I do, the CO's volunteered." They were killed, of course.
Flight Lieutenant M. Tomlinson,
Intelligence Officer
'Queuing up for the kill' - a massacre over Norway Sergeant T. Hudspeth of 57 Squadron
On 9 July Sergeant T. Hudspeth of 57 Squadron was on board one of 12 Blenheims of Nos. 21 and 57 Squadrons which had taken off to bomb a concentration
of aircraft reported at Stavanger aerodrome in Norway. Apprehensively the crews noted the absence of the forecast cloud as they approached the Norwegian coast, but they were under strict radio and wireless silence and could not confer; rather than break formation, they all pressed on. They delivered their attack, but almost at once 30 or more Me 109S and 110s rose in pursuit. Sergeant Hudspeth later recalled:
I could see through my mirror the enemy fighters manoeuvring to attack. On one occasion I saw six fighters queuing up getting ready for the kill. It was not long before casualties started to pile up. First I saw our port machine and its valiant crew smashed to smithereens when it was shot down and hit the sea. Then came the starboard machine's turn. He got a packet in the petrol tank and was burning like a torch. The pilot screamed out over his R/T that he was on fire, but there was little we could do about it. The Jerry fighter on his tail, with the usual Teutonic thoroughness, would not ease up in the slightest and continued to pour a stream of lead into the doomed machine, till I saw him, too, disintegrate into the sea, legs and arms and parts of the machine being scattered far and wide.......
Hudspeth's pilot finally found a friendly cloud, escaped, and made a successful belly-landing. Only four others of the 12, all badly damaged, managed to survive.
Even worse was the incredible ill fortune of 82 Squadron 97 the squadron which on 17 May had lost 11 out of 12 aircraft on one operation. Now, on 13 August, 12 of the Squadron set out to bomb Hemsteds airfield, in Holland. Enemy fighters intervened. For a second time, from a raid of squadron strength only one of 82 Sqn's Blenheims returned.
Sergeant T. Hudspeth
of 57 Squadron