An expectant air filled the Nissen hut in Yorkshire as the commanding officer of 460 Squadron RAAF, Wing Commander Arthur Hubbard, prepared for a historic briefing. The solidly built twenty-five-year-old, who came from Morriset on the New South Wales central coast, was the first Australian to command an all-Australian squadron in Bomber Command. He directed the attention of those present to a map on a wall at the far end of the room. A red marker on the map showed the Wellington crews their target for that night, 12 March 1942—the German North Sea port of Emden, the Ruhr valley’s sea port via the Dortmund–Ems canal.
Hubbard, who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1940 and had served with two RAF squadrons in England and the Middle East, had joined the RAF on a short-service commission before the war began. He started by calling out the names of captains who were listed for the raid before a Met officer outlined the weather they could expect on the flight. There would be fluffy cumulus cloud on the way and ‘10/10 cloud’ over the target, which meant conditions would be overcast.
The intelligence officer followed, explaining that Emden contained U-boat construction yards and was an important transshipment centre for Scandinavian iron ore. ‘However, you are to aim for the heart of the town, and your bombing height is 15,000 feet. Your bomb load will be six by 500 G.P. [General Purpose] bombs,’ he said, adding that while 460 Squadron was attacking Emden, another sixty-eight Wellingtons would be bombing Kiel, one of Germany’s major naval bases and shipbuilding centres. He warned that Emden’s defences were strong.
You can expect heavy searchlight concentration, which ring the town to the south, east and west. Flak is also pretty well concentrated: it is estimated they have several hundred of their 4.7’s defending the target, plus about 500 of the light 40mm type anti-aircraft gun. You may also encounter reasonable night-fighter opposition, although it is probable they will concentrate on the main force attacking Kiel.
The officer advised the crews they would take off at 2030 hours. Because of the weather, it was essential that they stay ‘bang on course all the way’. They could select their own routes to the target, but he suggested they heed the advice of the two squadron leaders. Arthur Hubbard concluded the briefing with a general summary of the operation: ‘Well, chaps, this is the moment we have all been waiting for. This is the squadron’s first operation, the climax to the months of training you have all put in, and as our first squadron in Bomber Command you have a big responsibility to set the standard. I know you will not fail.’
At take-off, each Wellington, with its six-man crew, was met by cheers and shouts from the rest of the squadron lining the runway. The cloud cover forecast by the Met officer set in over the North Sea and stayed with them for the full journey. In contrast to Kiel, where bombs were successfully dropped and badly damaged the shipyards and naval dockyard, the Emden operation was a failure: all the bombs fell more than eight kilometres off-target.
Two of those on the raid were pilot officers Bill Brill, twenty-five, and Arthur Doubleday, twenty-nine, who flew as second pilots. They both came from farms in the Riverina, in southern New South Wales, and were almost as close as brothers. Bill explained later that because nothing could be seen through the cloud, the skipper nosed in towards the thickest part of the flak on the assumption that something below it must be worth defending.
But every time we lined up on the best concentration and began to run in, the flak fizzled out and we’d be left seemingly pointed into nothingness. It did seem as if the artful Hun knew exactly what we were at and ran us around in circles for half an hour or more. There was no alternative but to select what might have been the city area and let the bombs go and hope for the best. I suppose at the worst we should have frightened a cow or two off her milk, which may have in turn deterred the German war machine!
The initial organisation of Bomber Command left much to be desired. The approach was almost haphazard. Plans were in the hands of squadron commanders, who were mostly left to attack as they chose. Group Headquarters played no part. If a raid clashed with an Entertainments National Service Association concert, some commanders would wait until it was over before taking off. Others took off early, which meant a raid could be spread over a few hours, with many individual runs.
On 7 November 1941 Sir Richard Peirse, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, ordered a major raid on Berlin, but of the 160 bombers that took off more than twenty were shot down or crashed. Little damage was done. Peirse was sacked in January 1942 and soon afterwards replaced by Arthur Harris. ‘Bomber’ Harris, as he later became known, believed unequivocally in both the efficacy and necessity of area bombing. As he put it, the Nazis had entered the war under the ‘rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them’. He continued: ‘At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’
Harris set about rectifying Bomber Command’s deficiencies. New navigational equipment and new planes were becoming available. Halifax aircraft, first operational in July 1941, were now arriving in large numbers. The Avro Lancaster flew on operations for the first time on the night of 10–11 March 1942, when two joined another 124 Wellingtons, Hampdens, Avro Manchesters and Stirlings in an ineffectual raid on the Krupps factory at Essen.
Three weeks later, on 2 April 1942, 455 Squadron’s Jack Davenport was among twenty-three Hampdens and seven Wellingtons involved in a mine-laying attack—or ‘gardening’ op as it was called—at Quiberon Bay, on France’s Biscay coast. Although the flak was heavy, Jack successfully laid his mine and bombed an aerodrome before leaving the target as fast as he could. Back at the base, he learned that fellow 455 Squadron member, Pilot Officer John Maloney, who had taken off just one minute before him, had failed to return. Maloney, a twenty-nine-year-old from Wagga Wagga, and his three crew were the first all-RAAF crew in Bomber Command to be killed. No trace of them was ever found. On 27 April, 455 Squadron was transferred to Coastal Command, a few weeks after 458 Squadron had been posted to the Middle East.
On 10 April, the first Lancasters were lost when eight went down on a raid to Essen. A week later, in a daring and disastrous daylight raid on a diesel engine works in Augsburg, seven of twelve Lancasters were shot down. Despite this, it was not long before the Lancaster became the basis of British bombing operations. But owing to the mediocrity of the Lancaster’s defensive weaponry, it was mostly used for night raids. The key to the Lancaster’s success was a huge bomb bay capable of carrying the largest bombs used by the RAF, including the 4000-lb, 8000-lb, or 12,000-lb Blockbusters. These loads were often supplemented with smaller bombs or incendiaries.
As the Lancasters came into service, a young Melburnian, Peter Isaacson, was completing his training on Wellingtons. Twenty-two-year-old Peter had a personality well suited to the extreme risks of flying with Bomber Command. He had been educated at Brighton Grammar, where his teachers saw him as a daredevil. After being selected as a pilot, he completed elementary flying training with a ‘below average’ ranking. During advanced training in Canada, however, his flying skills improved and he graduated at the head of his class. Having been selected for the RAAF aircrew reserve in mid–1940, he had no qualms about going to war: being Jewish, he had good reason to fight the virulently anti-Semitic Nazis. His former schoolteachers were far from surprised when they learned he was piloting bombers. Peter’s baptism of fire was not far away—and it would come at a time when Bomber Command’s losses were mounting, with an average casualty rate of 4.7 per cent on every raid. Such conditions would challenge any daredevil.
At about the same time that the Lancaster began transforming Bomber Command’s strike power, the navigational aid TR 1335, known as Gee (for Grid), became available. Navigation equipment in RAF bombers had previously consisted of a compass, a sextant, an astro-compass and a few other basic instruments. This made navigation in darkness extremely difficult. Gee was a phase-pulse radio and radar system whose signals appeared as blips on the frosted-glass end of a cathode-ray tube built into the aircraft’s radio. The relative positions of aircraft, target and land stations could now be measured, enabling crews to navigate and bomb ‘blind’. Gee also helped direct return flights to English aerodromes and prevented many of the accidents that had occurred earlier in the war.
The success of Gee emboldened Harris and led to a change in policy. Sixty German cities within Gee range were selected for mass bombing, using 1600–1800 tons of bombs per city. Harris believed that Bomber Command was being woefully under-utilised. He wanted an operation that would use almost all of Bomber Command’s front-line and reserve strength—one thousand aircraft. The target would be a German city, and the raid would be so devastating that Germans would force their leaders to sue for peace. He discussed his ‘Thousand Plan’ with Churchill, who was enthusiastic, and with Air Vice-Marshal Robert Saundby early in May 1942. Saundby, Harris’s deputy, checked the figures and reported that the plan was just about feasible.
Bomber Command then comprised thirty-seven medium and heavy bomber squadrons—sixteen Wellington, six Halifax, six Lancaster, five Stirling, two Manchester and two Hampden. This effectively gave Harris about 400 serviceable bombers—well below his target figure. If raids were suspended for forty-eight hours and unserviceable planes all serviced, the total could be increased to 500. However, if Harris also added Coastal Command’s Whitley, Hudson and Hampden bombers and the bombers that were being replaced with the new Lancaster bombers, he would have near enough to 1000 aircraft.
Churchill wanted Essen, as the heart of Germany’s industrial might, as the target, but Harris wanted Hamburg for its symbolic status. Advice from scientists was that Essen was not a good target, as an industrial haze veiled the city even at night, and this might make aiming difficult. The Operational Research Section advised that Cologne would be the ideal target: it was within flying range and, as a major railway hub, its destruction could seriously damage the movement of goods in that part of Germany. But the weather delayed the plan for a few days.
As Bomber Command squadrons prepared for the big raid, Bill Brill was in action on the night of 29–30 May, in a much smaller op involving just seventy-seven aircraft. His Wellington was one of twenty-seven detailed to bomb the Gnome et Rhône aircraft engine factory and two other industrial sites in the Paris suburb of Gennevilliers. Owing to foul weather over the Channel, Bill flew at an altitude of less than 200 feet until crossing the French coast. The clouds had begun to clear over Paris, and searchlights swept the sky, accompanied by heavy anti-aircraft fire. Most of the bombers released their loads from between 4000 and 8000 feet. Bill, however, dropped to 1500 feet before making his attack. With the bomb-bay doors open, flak struck his Wellington, damaging the hydraulics and rear gun turret and leaving one of the 1000-lb bombs hanging after the others dropped on target.
Returning to England through more bad weather, he spotted an emergency landing ground and brought the crippled aircraft down with the bomb-bay doors still open and one tyre flat. The plane was later scrapped. Bill’s was the only one of four Wellingtons from 460 Squadron to find the target area and successfully attack. For his ‘courage and determination’ in pressing home the assault, he was awarded the DFC on 26 June, the first pilot in 460 Squadron to be decorated.
On 30 May, Peter Isaacson wrote to his family: ‘I’m off on my first operation tonight and not as a second pilot either—but as captain. Don’t know where we are going yet but pretty sure it is over Germany.’ He was right. That day, weather conditions turned for the better. Although Hamburg was under a blanket of cloud, Cologne was not. Harris ordered his Thousand Bomber raid for that night. Writing to his group and station commanders, he made clear his hopes:
At best the result may bring the war to a more or less abrupt conclusion owing to the enemy’s unwillingness to accept the worst that must befall him increasingly as our bomber force and that of the United States of America build up. At worst it must have the most dire moral and material effect on the enemy’s war effort as a whole and force him to withdraw vast forces from his exterior aggressions for his own protection.
Harris now had 1047 bombers ready to take off from fifty-three bases across Britain. Sam Weller flew one of the 131 Halifax bombers from 4 Group that were taking part. The pre-flight briefing was tense but thrilling: ‘You can imagine the reaction, because we had usually operated with about 200 [aircraft] at most. An enormous roar went up.’
The bombers took off at 2230 hours. Once they reached Western Europe, crews were told to pick out the Rhine river and follow it to Cologne. The first bombers to arrive were the Stirlings and Wellingtons from 1 and 3 Groups equipped with Gee navigational systems. Their target was the Neumarkt, in the city’s old town. The idea was to set it alight with incendiary bombs so it would act as a beacon for the bombers that followed. These planes would bomb areas 1.5 kilometres to the north or south of the Neumarkt. They flew above cloud from the Netherlands to the German border where, as the meteorological office had predicted, the cloud disappeared. When the first planes reached Cologne, the moon gave the crews near perfect visibility. Fifteen minutes after the first bombs dropped, the old town was ablaze.
Arthur Doubleday took off with 460 Squadron, recalling that the nearest cloud cover he could see was ‘almost as far away as Colombo’.
As we went over the North Sea there was the biggest harvest moon. Yellow and big and bright and you could see the aircraft half a mile away. It was a magnificent evening. We weren’t in the first so-called waves that went over but we saw the target from a fair way back. This was the first time I hadn’t been picked up by searchlights and ack-ack. The whole searchlight belt had been shifted and placed around the city. We were delighted with this change because we didn’t have flak until we got into the target, whereas on previous sorties we had it for fifteen minutes going in. They couldn’t man the whole belt. It was bad for fifteen minutes but we weren’t holed on that raid.
Peter Isaacson was piloting a Wellington, and later wrote to his parents about the operation.
I didn’t feel a bit nervous—probably because I had so much to do, but I must confess I was sweating quite a bit taking off, because this was the first time I had taken off with a really heavy load. Everything was quiet going there. You could see the fires after about 10 minutes of leaving the Dutch coast. When we got there—about three quarters of the way through the raid—the place was blazing furiously . . . Gosh, what a mess we made of the place.
Just as the young pilot officer let go of his bombs from 12,000 feet, his Wellington was caught in a cone of searchlights. He immediately twisted and turned and managed to break free of the lights, losing 2000 feet as he did so. He returned unscathed.
In Cologne, though this was the 105th time in the war that air-raid sirens had indicated a bombing raid, the reaction of the civil defence force was slow. The bombers dropped 1455 tons of bombs, two-thirds of which were incendiaries. About 2500 separate fires were started, destroying more than 3300 buildings and damaging another 9500. Little was left standing save the city’s Gothic cathedral, Europe’s largest, with its art treasures intact. The great twin spires, 157 metres high, would serve as a navigational landmark for Allied aircraft on later raids deep into Germany.
The entire raid was over in just ninety minutes. Crews in the final run of bombers could see the glow of the blazing city from 160 kilometres away. Smoke from the fires rose 15,000 feet, and was so dense that the RAF could get no decent reconnaissance photos of the city for a week afterwards. Only four bombers were lost, in collisions over the city.
Two months later, when he became the first in 460 Squadron to complete a tour, Arthur Doubleday was awarded the DFC. Both he and his mate Bill Brill were subsequently seconded to the RAF as instructors, returning to No. 27 Operational Training Unit at Lichfield. They spent the next eleven months there, with Arthur promoted to Squadron Leader and Bill to Acting Squadron Leader.
A new elite unit, 156 Squadron RAF, Pathfinder Force (No. 8 Group), was set up on 15 August 1942. The Pathfinders’ role would be to locate and mark targets with flares for the main force to aim at, increasing the accuracy of their bombing. The Force was formed at the direct request of the Air Ministry and initially comprised five squadrons, one from each of the operational Bomber Command Groups: 156 Squadron (Wellingtons) from 1 Group, 109 Squadron (Wellingtons and Mosquitos) from 2 Group, 7 Squadron (Stirlings) from 3 Group, 35 Squadron (Halifaxes) from 4 Group, and 83 Squadron (Lancasters) from 5 Group.
Commanding Pathfinder Force was former Queensland jackaroo Donald Bennett. Born in 1910, he had joined the RAAF before transferring to the RAF in 1930. He completed a flying-boat course and became an instructor in 1933. But opportunities for advancement in the peacetime RAF were limited, and Bennett resigned and returned to Australia. Coming back to England two years later, he joined a fledgling commercial airline. In 1941, he returned to the RAF as an acting wing commander in command of an air navigation school. Command of 77 Squadron RAF and then 10 Squadron RAF followed. Bennett believed in never asking his men to do something he would not be prepared to do himself, and set an example by flying on many raids.
The Pathfinders were to lead the bomber stream to the target areas and drop sky markers and ground markers—red, green and yellow parachute flares that detonated at pre-set heights—at which the remainder of the force would aim. The initial objective was simply to take experienced crews and hone their navigation skills. There were also master bombers who would go down low, call in the main body of Pathfinders, and tell them where to drop their markers.
Six months after Bennett took over, he was promoted to air commodore and placed in command of the Pathfinder 8 Group. Tall and taciturn, Bennett took his responsibilities seriously. He explored every possible option for minimising aircrew losses and maximising the destructive power of the bomber force. RAF planning at this stage was based on the assumption that a Lancaster’s life was fifteen or sixteen operations. Bennett’s job was enormously stressful, and he did not suffer fools gladly. The dim and incompetent earned his wrath, and even the best airmen often found him difficult to work with. Fremantle-born Eric Silbert, a wireless operator/air gunner, was one of those who had first-hand experience of Bennett—by then an Air Vice-Marshal—when he later went through the Pathfinder Force Training School. It was here that those undergoing training learned what absolute importance Bennett placed on accuracy and timing. They had to be on the target within one minute of their given time, and their marker flares had to be dropped within 400 yards of the aiming point. If they failed to meet either requirement, they would have to report to Bennett. If they failed on two separate occasions, they would be asked to leave Pathfinder Force.
At the Pathfinder Force school there was one Nissen hut that fascinated the airmen. On its walls were graphs and statistics covering every imaginable detail of Bomber Command airmen lost on raids: age, nationality, where they had trained, the raid they were on—first or last, first few or last few, in what tour—the target, how and where they were shot down, and the time and altitude. There were no formal exams, but Bennett conducted his own after the men on the course had completed ten operational flights. Those who passed received the Pathfinder Force Award, a gold eagle worn underneath the wings on the lapel of the breast pocket. Eric Silbert was not prepared for what followed when he sat down at RAF Oakington station in front of Bennett. He was asked what foreign languages he spoke.
I included French, having done French all the time at school, and Bennett’s first question was: ‘Where did you go to school, Silbert?’ I told him Aquinas College, Perth. His answer was: ‘We’ll strike out French then, now next question.’ This was my only blemish. The interesting point about these exams was that one was apt to be asked [a question] on anything, whether it be navigation, gunnery or flying. Bennett was a believer that everyone should know at least some aspects about everyone’s job in the crew. On two occasions in my time he came around to Oakington, sat in front of all crews and asked them their problems. His answer was often: ‘I can do this and you should be able to. We all had the same training so get on with the job.’ He was a practical man as well as a theoretician and was a great leader.
Despite his lack of interpersonal skills, Bennett’s high standards brought forward volunteers from among the best and the brightest of the bomber crews. Their aircraft were equipped with Gee equipment, or its later version, Oboe, and H2S, the world’s first ground-mapping radar, which enabled aircraft to drop flares and bombs accurately even in heavy fog or darkness. They could also differentiate between land and water, and thus indicate when the aircraft was crossing the coast, and the whereabouts of lakes and streams. Bennett later said that completing a single bombing raid over Germany was the equivalent of going through a great naval battle such as the Battle of Jutland, in 1916.
The Pathfinders first went into action on the night of 18–19 August 1942, when 118 Bomber Command aircraft attacked the German port of Flensburg on the Baltic Sea. Leading the raid were thirty-one Pathfinder bombers, among them Stirlings, Halifaxes, Lancasters and Wellingtons from RAF squadrons 7, 35, 83 and 156. Because of wind shifts, the bomber force drifted north of the target and the town was not hit. A second op against Frankfurt six nights later was only partially successful owing to heavy cloud conditions. But with Pathfinder Force now serving as guides, Bomber Command was becoming more accurate and more deadly.