Jack Mitchell, the 467 Squadron pilot who had left home wondering about the stick he had driven into the ground at the Sugarloaf in Tasmania, slid into the pilot’s seat of his Lancaster and left Waddington at 2020 hours on the night of 21 January 1944. His orders were to bomb Magdeburg, about 140 kilometres south–west of Berlin. An important industrial centre producing armour and machinery, the city was also a transport hub, a junction for six railway lines and seven arterial roads as well as river routes between the Elbe and Rhine. A total of 648 aircraft were on the raid for the first major attack on the city, fifteen of them from Jack’s squadron. Jack’s Lancaster was carrying one 4000-pound bomb, fifty-six thirty-pounders and 1200 four-pound incendiaries.
Jack’s crew consisted of Flying Officer Ken Francis, the navigator, from Sydney; Sergeant Tony Atkinson, the flight engineer, a New South Welshman who had been working as an engineer in England when war broke out; Flight Sergeant Reg Corcoran, the bomb aimer, from Sydney; Flying Officer Lawrie Pearse, the mid-upper gunner, from the Western Australian wheat-belt town of Cunderdin; and Flight Sergeant Ron Gallagher, the rear gunner, from Kalgoorlie. Rounding out the crew was the Scottish wireless operator, Sergeant Bill Summers. All of them were aged between twenty and twenty-five, and three were engaged to be married.
They were a tight crew. As Ken Francis wrote to his family, ‘I could not wish for better or more reliable companions in this business.’ They knew their jobs and were a ‘decent lot’ he added. But Ken found it hard to come to terms with the nature of his job, dropping bombs that killed civilians and caused terrible destruction. After his first raid, he wrote in his diary, ‘I looked out over the target and everything seemed unreal, it was like the decorations on a Xmas tree. But it was hell for the people down below.’ After the next one, he wrote, ‘I did not look out this time.’
The Germans followed the progress of the bomber force across the North Sea, and even before it reached the German coast, their night fighters struck with murderous effect. A total of fifty-seven aircraft were lost—thirty-five Halifaxes and twenty-two Lancasters. The attack was a failure. Thrown into disarray, the force dropped most of its bombs outside Magdeburg.
Jack Mitchell’s Lancaster was among the lost. Nothing was heard from it after take-off. In Australia, the Department of Air notified each man’s family by telegram that he was missing, having ‘failed to return to base presumably due to enemy action’. The telegram continued: ‘The Minister for Air joins with Air Board in expressing sincere sympathy in your anxiety.’ Four days later, 467 Squadron Commanding Officer Sam Balmer wrote to Jack’s father, Cliff Mitchell: ‘Your son was the Pilot and Captain of the aircraft which set out on operations and although he was only with us a short while he was considered a fine and capable officer who will be sadly missed by us all.’
With no confirmation of death, many parents—and fellow airmen—clung to the hope that their son or mate had been captured. In a letter a few weeks later, Sam Balmer wrote: ‘We are all hoping that [Jack] and his crew may have been able to bail out and later be reported as prisoners of war.’
Tony Atkinson’s father wrote to Cliff Mitchell in solidarity:
[Tony] was in England when war broke out so immediately joined the RAF with four years almost as ground staff, two of them in Canada and had all the time been endeavouring to get into the air. He succeeded last August when an application for a flight engineer’s job made by him twelve months before in Canada came home to roost, it pleased him immensely, I’m afraid his mother and I were not nearly so gratified; however he got what he most wanted and all to do now is to wait for news and may all come out right.
So now we are pinning our hopes on them all being POWs and I believe that no news for the next couple of months is good news.
A few weeks after sending the graphic description of the Ruhr raid to his parents in Sydney, navigator Bruce Foskett prepared for another op. His Halifax was among 891 bombers sent to Berlin on the night of 15 February 1944, the first time that more than 500 Lancasters and more than 300 Halifaxes had flown on a raid together. This force too was spotted soon after it left the English coast, but for their approach flight the planes swung north over Denmark. This put them beyond the range of most German fighters, but only for a time: the foiled fighters simply waited to attack the bombers over Berlin. Cloud covered the city for much of the raid, but it still killed 320 people, caused nearly 1200 fires, destroyed nearly 1000 homes, and wrecked some of Berlin’s most important war-matériel plants, especially in the Siemensstadt area. The 2642 tons of bombs dropped was a record.
Among twenty-six Lancasters and seventeen Halifaxes lost on the raid was Bruce Foskett’s. It was shot down over Falkenberg, just outside Berlin, killing all on board. The Germans identified Bruce’s body by the service number on a tab inside his sock. The bomb aimer, twenty-one-year-old Pilot Officer John Fisher, was also Australian. The crew members were buried with full military honours by a Luft-waffe detachment and their graves ‘decorated with fir branches in traditional German winter style’, according to an official report.
The wing commander of the Canadian Air Force squadron wrote to Bruce’s father four days later, noting that even though Bruce had just arrived on the squadron, he had ‘demonstrated great ability and made many friends’. Bruce’s effects had already been gathered together and forwarded to the RAF central depository. He concluded that Bruce’s comrades in the RCAF admired ‘the heroic sacrifice your son has made so far from home in the cause of freedom and in the service of his country’.
A few months later the Foskett family received a second blow. On 31 October 1944, Bruce’s elder brother Russell, a squadron leader who had been awarded the DFC, was returning from operations to his base at Kalamaki in Greece when his Spitfire developed engine trouble over the Mediterranean Sea. Russell bailed out but was too low for his parachute to open. His body was recovered by a Royal Navy aircraft carrier and he was buried at sea.
Ross Stanford seemed to revel in the challenge of the Berlin raids. The twenty-six-year-old South Australian former bank clerk took part in eight such operations with 467 Squadron. When a recruiting train came through his home town of Tailem Bend in 1941, Ross had eagerly volunteered, only to have his hopes dashed when the medical officer declared him unfit for flying. A cricketer who would one day reach first-class level, he had once had concussion when a ball hit him on the back of the head. It was feared that the after-effects might impede his performance at 20,000 feet.
Four months later, Ross presented himself once again at the RAAF recruiting office in Adelaide. While waiting to see the medical officer, he struck up a conversation with a corporal who quietly advised him not to mention the concussion, even though it was on his medical record. It worked. He sailed through the physical and was designated as a pilot. In England, he quickly developed a fine reputation, though on one occasion he was nonplussed when his station commander asked to fly with him while he dropped a few practice bombs at the Wainfleet Range, on the east coast.
I felt there must have been a problem somewhere, but anyway off we went and flew up to 8000 feet, with a bombing error calculated to 20,000 feet. We dropped about ten practice bombs, and when we landed I thought we’d done pretty well, although the group captain said he thought I’d used too much rudder on my bombing runs. At afternoon tea he came and sat opposite me, clutching the results of the exercise sent over by Wainfleet. He said, ‘I’ll have to apologise to you, Stanford. Waddington reports that yours was the best exercise put in by anyone on the squadron since they’ve been there.’ Our average error was sixty-eight yards—very tight bombing in those days.
Among Ross’s crew were four Australians—Warrant Officer Alan Jordan, the wireless operator; Pilot Officer Tom Butler, the navigator; Warrant Officer George Clarke, the bomb aimer; and Pilot Officer Ken Jewell, the rear gunner. They joined 617 Squadron RAF on 24 February 1944. Their first op came a week later: a raid on the La Ricamarie ball-bearing works near Lyon. When they reached the target, however, they found that the bombsight had failed. Ross called the squadron’s commander, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who instructed him to wait until all the other crews had bombed.
He then told me to come down to 3000 feet—the target was roughly 1200 feet above sea level—and instruct my bomb aimer to drop his bombs by his own judgement. He gave me directions to come in downwind so that the smoke was all blowing the other way. The factory was well alight by now, and we came down and George Clarke dropped his bombs. It was the first time he’d dropped bombs on judgement and the lowest I’d ever flown to drop them!
Filled as they were with high explosives, incendiary bombs, petrol and oxygen, the bombers were an inviting target for German fighter pilots, as air gunner Geoff Smith found. A flight sergeant with Pathfinder 156 Squadron RAF, Geoff, who came from Sydney, was the only Australian on a Pathfinder crew that was making its sixth trip to Berlin on 15 February 1944. Geoff had been flying as mid-upper gunner, but on this night he was sent to the rear turret so his usual place could be taken by a new gunner who had never been on an op before. Apart from the usual flak over the coast, the flight was uneventful. But, as they prepared to make their bombing run, Geoff saw what appeared to be fighter flares in the sky. Then he recognised the wing tip, nose and identification lights of a night fighter. Telling the pilot to take evasive action, he instantly swung his turret and opened fire at the German aircraft, which was only 500 or 600 metres away. Within a few seconds, four lines of tracer and two lines of cannon fire streamed from the fighter’s wings. Geoff got in a good burst and saw the fighter explode in the sky, but the Lancaster had already been hit.
So had Geoff: a cannon shell and machine-gun bullets had shattered one of his legs. His turret was unserviceable, and his parachute cover was on fire. Cannon shells had raked the Lancaster from the tail along the fuselage to the mid-upper turret, which was now out of action. An exploding shell had broken the new mid-upper gunner’s left leg and ripped open his calf muscle. The oil pipe at the bottom of his turret had been pierced and the oil was blazing. Instruments had been blown to bits, hydraulics shattered, the rear wheel shot away, the starboard wheel damaged, and the flaps rendered inoperable. A shell fragment had pierced one engine, and the bomb-bay doors were jammed shut.
When the captain called his crew to check for casualties, there was no answer from the mid-upper gunner. The wireless operator went back to see what had happened and found the gunner lying on the floor without his oxygen mask, almost unconscious. Despite his broken leg, he had gone down to beat out the oil fire with his helmet and then tried to crawl forward and inform the pilot. Revived by oxygen, he was laid out on the floor while the fire was put out. The wireless operator climbed into the mid-upper turret and took up the watch for enemy fighters.
Some of the crew told Geoff they were coming down to get him out. But knowing that the mid-upper gunner was wounded and his turret out of action, he refused to be moved, despite the appalling pain of his shattered leg. The navigator extinguished the fire with his parachute, and Geoff continued to operate his turret manually.
The crippled Lancaster now headed for home, but with its instruments all but useless, it strayed off course and flew into a heavily defended area. The pilot made such violent evasive manoeuvres that at one stage the crew thought he must have lost control. Eventually, however, they flew clear of the flak and, straightening course, crossed the coast to the sea. By this time Geoff’s oxygen mask had frozen up, so he took it off and breathed the thin high-altitude air.
As they flew over the sea, the crew chopped the bombs away and then went to the rear turret to extricate Geoff. The turret door was frozen so hard they had to chop it away with a crash axe. Still fully conscious, Geoff tried to pull himself out by using his left leg and hands, but his shattered right leg was caught in the ammunition belt and controls. The crew struggled for almost an hour to free him, then gave him painkillers and laid him on the fuselage floor.
The pilot headed for the nearest base, where he intended to make a belly landing, but the bomb-bay doors, which had been opened when the crew cut the bombs away, could not be closed. He had no alternative but to come down on the damaged undercarriage. The bomb aimer and wireless operator lay down on either side of Geoff to protect him in case they crashed. The pilot made his approach and brought the crippled bomber down in what Geoff later described as the ‘most beautiful landing’ imaginable. The fuselage was hacked away and Geoff—his hands, forehead and cheekbones badly frostbitten—was carried out of the aircraft, along with the mid-upper gunner. Next morning, his leg was amputated. He recovered to learn that he had been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal.